Title: Seven Out Of Time
Author: Arthur Leo Zagat
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Language: English
Date first posted: Nov 2006
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"No excuses, Mr. March." The office was enormous, the desk massive, but
sitting behind the latter Pierpont Alton Sturdevant dominated both. Not
because of any physical quality. He was below average in stature nor did his
graying hair have the patches of white at the temples that fiction writers
and the illustrators of advertisements seem to think are the invariable mark
of 'men of distinction.' It was rather his hawk's nose and the sexless
austerity of his thin mouth that made me think of him as resembling some
Roman Emperor, and myself, a very junior attorney on the staff of the august
firm of Sturdevant, Hamlin, Mosby and Garfield, as some young centurion
returned from Ulterior Gaul. "You should know by this time," the dry voice
rustled, "that I am not interested in excuses, but only in facts."

I had, in truth, just returned to the city, from the remote reaches of
suburban Westchester, and what I had to report was failure. "The fact is,
sir, that I have not found Evelyn Rand."

Sturdevant was very still, looking at me in the huge leather armchair to
which he'd motioned me with a terse, 'Good morning.' He was expressionless
and still for a long moment and then he asked, "If you continue searching for
her, how soon do you think you will be able to locate her?"

I didn't like that if. I didn't like it at all but I contrived to keep my
dismay out of my face and my voice. "I can't say, Mr. Sturdevant. I haven't
been able to unearth a single clue as to what happened to her." The girl had
walked out of her Park Avenue apartment house that Sunday morning, two weeks
ago yesterday, and vanished. "The doorman seems to have been the last person
ever to see her. He offered to call a taxi for her and she said that she
would walk to church. He watched her go down the block and around the
corner."

* * * * *

"I could not take my eyes off the lass," the grizzled
attendant had
told me, "though my 'phone was buzzing like mad. She swung along freelike an'
springy like as if it was the ould sod was under her feet ate not this gray
cancrete that chokes the good dirt. I was minded o' the way my own Kathleen
used to come up Balmorey Lane to meet me after work was done, longer ago than
I care to think."

By the way he spoke and the look in his faded eyes, I knew I needed
only to tell him what it would mean to Evelyn Rand if the fact that she had
never returned—never been seen again, got out, to keep him silent. And
so it had been with the elevator boy who had brought her down from her
penthouse home and with the servants she had there; the granite-faced butler,
the buxom cook, Renee Bernos, the black- haired and vivacious maid. Each of
them would go to prison for life sooner than say a single word that might
harm her. Nor was this because she was generous with her wages and her tips.
One cannot buy love.

* * * * *

"That is all you have been able to discover," Sturdevant
pressed me.

"That is all."

"In other words you are precisely where you were two weeks ago," he
murmured, "except for this." He turned a paper on his desk so that I could
see it, then tapped it with a long, bony finger. "Except, Mr. March, for
this."

It was a statement of account headed ESTATE OF DARIUS RAND, Dr., to
STURDEVANT, HAMLIN, MOSBY & GARFIELD, Cr. Beneath this heading was a list
of charges, thus:

1-27-47 1/2 hr. P. A. Sturdevant, Esq. @ $400... . $ 200.00

1-27-47—2/10/47 88 1/4 hrs. to Mr. John March @ $25... .
$2206.25

1-27-47 Disbursements and expenses to Mr. John March, (acct.

2-10-47 attached)... $64.37

Total $2470.62

"Two thousand, four hundred and seventy dollars and sixty-two cents,"
Sturdevant's finger tapped the total, "up to last Saturday. To which must be
added the charge for this quarter hour of my time and yours, plus whatever
you have spent over the weekend. Two and a half thousand dollars, Mr. March,
and no result."

He paused but I said nothing. I was waiting for what he would say
next.

He said it. "As trustee of the Estate of Darius Rand I cannot approve any
further expenditure. You will return to your regular duties, Mr. March, and I
shall notify the police that Miss Rand has disappeared."

And that was when I lost my grip on myself—"No!" I fairly yelled as
I came up to my feet. "You can't do that to her." He wasn't the Head of the
Firm to me in that moment. He was a shrivelled old curmudgeon whose scrawny
neck I lusted to wring. "You can't make her a pauper. You don't know what
you're doing."

I stopped. Not by reason of anything Sturdevant said or did, for he said
or did nothing. I don't know how he made me aware I was making a fool of
myself, but he did.

And now he said, quietly, "I know exactly what I am doing. I know better
than you do that because of the embarrassment his actress wife had caused
him, before she died, by trailing her escapades through the newspapers,
Darius Rand's will tied up his fortune in a trust fund the income of which
goes to his daughter Evelyn only as long as her name never appears for any
reason whatsoever in the news columns of the public press. When she vanished
I determined as her legal guardian to conceal the situation for a reasonable
length of time since a report to the police must inevitably bring her name
into the newspapers. That reasonable time has in my opinion now expired
without any hope of her return and I no longer can justify my silence.
Therefore, as trustee of—"

"The Estate of Darius Rand," I broke in. "You're measuring the happiness
of a girl against dollars and cents."

The faint shadow that clouded Sturdevant's ascetic countenance might mean
I'd gotten under his skin but his answer did not admit it. "No, Mr. March. I
am measuring a sentimental attachment to a young lady over whose welfare I
have watched for more than six years against the dictates of duty and
conscience."'

"Aren't there times, sir, when one may compromise a bit with duty and even
conscience?" Not him, I thought. Not this dried mummy, but I had to try to
persuade him. "Give me a week more. Just the week. I'll take a leave of
absence without pay, I'll even resign, so you won't have to charge the Estate
for my time. I'll pay the expenses out of my own pocket. If you'll only keep
this thing away from the police and the papers for a week I'll find Evelyn.
I'm sure I will."

Gray eyebrows arched minutely. "It seems to me that you are oddly
concerned," Sturdevant mused, "with a young lady whom you have never seen,
whom you never even heard of up to fourteen days ago. Or am I mistaken in
that?"

"No," I admitted. "Fourteen days ago I was not aware that Evelyn Rand
existed. But today," I leaned forward, palms pressing hard on the desktop,
"today I think I know her better even than I know myself. I know her
emotional makeup, how she would react in any conceivable situation. I have
literally steeped myself in her personality. I have spent hours in her home,
her library, her boudoir. I have talked on one pretext or another with
everyone who was close to her; her servants, her dressmaker, her hairdresser.
I know that her hair is the color of boney and exactly how she wears it. I
know that she favors light blues in her dress and pastel tones of pink and
green. I have even smelled the perfume she had especially compounded for
her."

* * * * *

In his little shop on East Sixty-third Street, the
walrus- mustached
old German in the long chemist's smock had looked long and uncertainly at me.
"Ich weiss nicht—" he muttered.

"You say a friend from Fraulein Rand you are und a bottle from her
individual perfoom you want to buy her for a present. Aber I don't know. Ven
I say so schoen ein maedchen many loffers must haff, she laughs und says she
hass none. She says dot ven someone she finds who can say to her so true
tings about her as dot I say in der perfoom I make for her, den she vill haff
found her loffer but such a one she hass not yet met."

"Look," I argued. "Would I know the number of the formula if she had not
told it to me?"

It was from Renee Bernos I had gotten it, but the German was convinced.
When I opened the tiny bottle he'd sold me for enough to have fed a slum
family a month, my dreary hotel room was filled with the fragrance of spring;
of arbutus and crocuses and hyacinths and the evasive scent of leaf-buds; and
with another fainter redolence I could not name but that was the very essence
of dreams.

For a moment it had seemed almost is if Evelyn Rand herself was there
in my room...

* * * * *

"Ah," Sturdevant murmured. "What did you hope to accomplish
by so strange
a procedure?"

"I figured that if I could understand her, if I could get inside her mind
somehow, I should know exactly what was in it when she walked down Park
Avenue to Seventy-third Street and turned the corner and never reached the
church for which apparently she had set out."

"Is that all you've done in two weeks?"

"This weekend I went out to the house in which Evelyn's childhood was
spent. It is closed, of course, but I got the keys from your secretary. I
spent most of Saturday in that house and all of yesterday."

* * * * *

The other rooms had told me nothing about Evelyn Rand,
and now I was in
the last one, the nursery. It was dim and dusty and musty- smelling, for it
had been closed and never again entered after a little girl of six had been
sent to boarding school because her mother had no time to be bothered with
her.

I pulled out a bureau drawer too far. It fell to the floor and split and
that was how I found the thing that had slipped into the crack between the
drawer's side and its warped bottom, at least fourteen years ago.

As my fingers closed on the bit of carved stone that lay in a clutter of
doll's clothes, battered toys and mummified insects, something seemed to flow
from it and into me; a vague excitement.

And a vaguer fear.

It was slightly smaller than a dime, approximately an eighth of an inch
thick and roughly circular in outline and there was, strangely enough, no
dust upon it. It was black, a peculiar, glowing black that though utterly
unrelieved appeared to shimmer with a colorless iridescence so that almost it
seemed I held in my palm a bit of black light strangely solid. Too, it was
incongruously heavy for its size, and when on impulse I tested it, I found it
hard enough to scratch glass.

The latter circumstance made more remarkable the accomplishment of the
artist who had fashioned the gem. For it was not a solid mass with a design
etched seal-like upon it, but a filigree of ebony coils that rose to its
surface and descended within its small compass and writhed again into view
'til the eye grew weary of following the Findings.

Close-packed and intricate as were the thread-thin loops, they formed a
single continuous line. True, two or three of the coils were interrupted at
one point in the periphery by a wedge-shaped gap about an eighth of an inch
deep, but the rough edges of the break made it obvious that this was the
result of some later accident and not a Part of the original intent.

I could not bring myself to believe that any human could have had the
skill and the infinite patience to have carved this out of a single piece of
whatever the stone was. It must have been made in parts and cemented
together. I bent closer to see if I could find some seam, some evidence of
jointure.

I saw none. But I saw the snake's head.

Almost microscopically small yet exquisitely fashioned, it lay midway
between the gem's slightly convex surfaces, at its very center. I made out
the lidless eyes, the nostrils, the muscles at the corners of the distended
mouth.

To avoid any interruption of the design, as I then thought, the reptile
had been carved as swallowing its own tail.

A strange, weird toy for a little girl, I thought, and put it away in
my vest pocket meaning to fathom out later what it could tell me about Evelyn
Rand.

* * * * *

"You seem to have been making a good thing of your
assignment," Pierpont
Alton Sturdevant remarked, "wangling a week-end in the country out of it, at
the Estate's expense."

I felt my face flush and anger pound my temples but if I said what I
wanted to, what faint chance there was of persuading him to delay reporting
Evelyn's disappearance would be lost. I swallowed, said, "I also talked to
the woman who was Evelyn Rand's nurse and with whom she spent the summer
before you sent her to college."

"And what did you learn from Faith Corbett?" For the first time a note of
interest crept into his voice although his face still was an expressionless
Roman mask. "What did you learn from Evelyn's old nurse?"

What I had learned he would not understand. "Nothing," I answered him.
"Nothing that I can put into words."

* * * * *

Faith Corbett, so shrunken and fragile it seemed she was
one with the
shadows of her tiny cottage, had asked me in for a cup of tea. "Evelyn was a
dear child," her tenuous voice mused as the scrubbed kitchen grew misty with
winter's early dusk, "but sometimes I was frightened of her. I would hear her
prattling in the nursery and when I opened the door she would be quite alone,
but she would look up at me with those great, gray eyes of hers and gravely
say that so-and-so had been there just now, and it would be a name I had
never heard."

"Oh," I said. "She was just an imaginative child. And she was always alone
except for you and so dreamed up playmates for herself."

"Perhaps so," the old woman agreed, "but she was no child that summer she
stayed here with me, and what happened the day before she went away I did not
understand and I will never forget."

She took a nibble of toast and a sip of tea and though I waited silently
for her to go on, she did not. Her thoughts had wandered from what she'd been
saying, as old people's thoughts have a way of doing. "What was it?" I called
them back. "What happened the day before Evelyn went away to college?"

"I was packing her trunk," the old lady mused. "I could not find her
tennis shoes so I went downstairs to ask her what she had done with them.
Evelyn was not in the house, but when I went out to the porch I saw her on
the garden path. She was going toward the gate through the twilight, and
there was an eagerness in the way she moved that was new to her.

"I stood and watched, my heart fluttering in my breast, for I knew there
was no youngster about that ever had had so much as a second glance from my
sweet. She came to the gate and stopped there, taking hold of the pickets
with her hands. Like a quiet white flame she was as she looked down the
road.

"They had not put the macadam on it yet and the dust lay glimmering in the
dimness. All of a sudden Evelyn got stiff-like and I looked to see who was
coming.

"The road was as empty and still as it had been before, and there was no
one upon it.

"The air was smoky, kind of, like it gets in the fall and there wasn't a
leaf stirring, but there must have been a breath of wind on the road 'cause I
saw a little whirl of dust come drifting along it. When it came to the gate
where Evelyn was, it almost stopped. But it whispered away, and all at once
it was gone.

"All the eagerness was out of Evelyn. I heard her sob and I ran down the
path calling her name. She turned. There were tears on her cheeks. 'Not yet',
she sobbed. 'Oh Faith! It isn't time yet.'"

"'It isn't time for what?' I asked her, but she would say nothing more
and I knew it was no use to ask again. And the next day she went
away..."

Faith Corbett's voice went on and on about how she rented this cottage
with the pension the Estate granted her and how it was hard to live alone,
but I heard her with only half an ear. I was thinking of how in that smoky
fall twilight it had seemed to Faith Corbett as if Evelyn Rand were going
down through the garden to meet her lover, and I was recalling how the
grizzled old doorman had said, 'I was minded a' the way my Kathleen used to
walk up Balmorey Lane to meet me.' And trailing across my brain had been the
frightening thought that perhaps when Evelyn Rand had turned the corner into
Seventy-third Street a whirl of dust might have come whispering across the
asphalt...

"Well," I conceded, "she did make me certain the girl was unhappy and
lonely in that motherless home of hers. But, as an imaginative child will,
she found ways of consoling herself."

"Such as?"

"Such as writing verse." I indicated the yellowed papers I had laid on
Sturdevant's desk when I came in.

* * * * *

The only light left in the cottage kitchen had been the
wavering
radiance of the coal fire in the range. So much talking had tired Faith
Corbett and she nodded in her chair, all but asleep.

"Thank you for the tea," I said rising. "I'll be going along now."

The old woman came awake with a start. "Wait," she exclaimed. "Wait! I
have something to show you. Something nobody but me has ever seen before."
She rose too and went out of the room, the sound of her feet on the clean
boards like the patter of a child's feet except that it was slower. 'I stood
waiting and wondering, and in a little while she was back with a number of
yellowed papers in her hand, pencilled writing pale and smudged upon
them.

"Here," she said, giving them to me. "Maybe they will help you find
her."

The papers rustled in my hand. I had been very careful to conceal from
Faith Corbett the object of my visit and I was wondering how she could
possibly know Evelyn Rand had vanished.

* * * * *

"Verse?" Sturdevant peered at the sheets as he might have
looked at
something slightly distasteful. "Poems?"

Eager as I was to pierce the dry husk of rectitude in which he was
encased, I had sense enough to retreat from my intention of reading to him,
in that great room with its drape-smothered windows and its walls lined by
drab law books, the lines a child had penned in a sun-bright garden. He would
hear the limping rhythm and the faulty rhymes; he never would understand the
wistful imagery of the words, the nostalgia for some vaguely apprehended
Otherland where all was different and being different must be happier.

"Poems," I assented. "They have told me more than anything else exactly
what Evelyn Rand is like."

"And so it has cost the Estate almost two and a half thousand dollars to
find out that Evelyn Rand once wrote poems. You haven't even located a
photograph of her, so that I can give the authorities more to go by than a
word of mouth description."

As far as anyone knew Evelyn never had been photographed. But, "I've done
better than that," I said, triumphantly. "I've found out that a portrait of
her is in existence, painted by—" I named a very famous artist but
shall not, for reasons that shortly appear, repeat that name here.

"Indeed. Why did you not bring that portrait here instead of these?" He
flicked a contemptuous finger at the sheaf of old papers. "Why did you not
bring it here, Mr. March?"

"Because it is in a gallery on Madison Avenue. I intend to go there as
soon as you finish with me and—"

Sturdevant's frosty look checked me. "You seem to forget, Mr. March, that
I have cancelled your assignment to this matter."

There it was. I hadn't changed his decision in the least. My
disappointment was too keen for speech for an instant, and in that instant
the Call-O-Vox on his desk grated, with its metallic distortion of human
tones: "Nine-thirty, Mr. Sturdevant. Mr. Holland of United States Steel is
here for his appointment."

Sturdevant clicked the switch that permitted his secretary to hear him.
"Send Mr. Holland in, Miss Carter. And please make a note. John March has
been granted a leave of absence without pay for one week from date. This
office will do nothing in the matter of Evelyn Rand until Monday the
twenty-first."

He turned to me and I swear that there was a twinkle in his eyes. "Do not
forget, Mr. March," he said, using a well-worn lawyer's phrase, "that time is
of the essence of this contract."

I was to recall that warning, but in a sense far different from that which
he intended.

Art lovers are not as a rule early risers, and so after I
had purchased a
catalogue from the drowsy Cerberus in the foyer and passed through the red
plush portieres before which he sat, I had the high- ceiled exhibition room
to myself.

Shaded, tubular lights washing the surfaces of the paintings on the walls
accentuated the dimness that filled the reaches of the gallery. A decorous
hush brooded here; the thick, soft carpeting muffling the sound of my feet,
close- drawn window drapes smothering traffic noise from without. I passed a
circular seat in the center of the floor and saw Evelyn Rand looking at me
from the further wall.

Although I had never seen her pictured anywhere, as sure was I that this
was the portrait I had come to see that I did not took at the gray catalogue
I'd picked up a the door but went right to it.

I was aware only of her face at first, ethereal and some how luminous
against the dark amorphous background the artist had chosen to give her. It
seemed to me that there was a message for me in the gray, frank eyes that met
mine, message somewhere beneath their surface. It almost seemed to me that
the satin-soft red lips were on the point of speaking.

Those lips were touched with a wistful smile, and there was something sad
about them. Somehow the portraitist had contrived to make very real the glow
of youth in the damask cheeks, the lustre of girlhood in the honeyed texture
of the hair, but there was, too, something ageless about that face, and a
yearning that woke a responsive ache within me.

Yes, this girl could have written the poems that were locked now in a
drawer of my own desk. Yes, she would be loved by everyone who had the good
fortune to know her.

She must have been about sixteen at the time of the portrait. The body one
sensed within the gossamer frock, a misty blue such as tinctures the sky when
it is lightly brushed with cloud, was just burgeoning into womanhood. The
hollows at the base of the neck were not quite yet filled.

A fine gold chain circled that neck and pendant from it was a black gem,
replica of the one I'd found in the nursery. There had, then, been two of
them. Odd! I looked closer. I was not mistaken. The edge of the painted
amulet was marred by a wedge-shaped break. But the same accident could not
have marred two artifacts in precisely the same way. Nor could the one in the
portrait be the same as that I had found in the nursery. The Evelyn Rand
painted here was at least sixteen as I've said and when she'd sat for the
portrait the black stone I'd found had been lost and locked behind a door
that had not been opened for almost ten years.

I was wrong, of course, in thinking the breaks were exactly matched. I
must be wrong, yet it was with curious reluctance that I fished the gem I'd
found out of my vest pocket.

It was the same. It was precisely the same as the one in the portrait.

The stroke of a tower clock came dully into the dim gallery. Bonn-n-
ng. As if to escape from the thoughts that probed at my mind I counted
the strokes. Bonn-n-ng. Two. Bo-nn-n-ng. Three. Automatically I
glanced at my wrist watch. Ten o'clock. Bonn-n-ng...

The little man had come up so quietly beside me that he seemed almost to
have materialized out of the air of the empty gallery, yet somehow I was not
startled. "Yes," I responded, slipping the stone back into my pocket. "Yes,
it is quite interesting."

The fellow was short, so short that the top of his head, completely bald,
barely came to my shoulder. That head seemed out of proportion, seemed almost
grotesquely too large for his small figure and his round face seemed to float
almost disembodied in the light from Evelyn Rand's portrait, the rest of him
in shadow.

His skin was yellowish and of an odd lustreless texture I should have
thought of as 'parchment-like' except that parchment is wrinkled and this
skin was so smooth that I had a disquieting impression it might be
artificial. There was nothing artificial about the tiny eyes that peered
unblinkingly at the picture, black eyes keener and more piercing than any I'd
'til then seen.

"You have noticed," the little man was saying, "how painstakingly the
artist has depicted every physical detail. You feel that merely by reaching
out you can touch the warmth of the girl's flesh, or straighten that fold in
her frock the wind has disarranged, or take that black pendant in your hand
and examine it more closely."

Did his glance flash to my face at this mention of the gem, as if to trap
any change in my expression before I could mask it? I could not be sure. He
was looking at the portrait again and his low, clear voice flowed on.

"But I wonder if you appreciate how much of his subject's personality the
artist has contrived to convey. She is not quite in tune with the world where
she finds herself. All her life she has been lonely, because she does not
quite belong. She has a sort of half- knowledge of matters hidden from others
of her race and time, not altogether realized but sufficiently so that very
dimly she is aware of the peril the full unveiling of that knowledge would
bring upon her."

"What peril?" I demanded, twisting to him. "What do you know about
her?"

He smiled blandly at me, answered, "I know what the artist put on that
canvas for me to read. And for you. Look at it again."

I did. I saw the girl. I saw the dark, amorphous background and that was
all.

"Look." I felt fingers brush lightly across my eyes but I did not resent
the liberty, forgot it, forgot the little man who had taken it.

Behind the painted girl there was no longer formless shadow. There was,
instead, a desolate landscape so informed with strangeness that I knew if it
existed anywhere it was nowhere on Earth. And from that scene there reached
out to me a sense of awe and a sense of overpowering dread.

No living thing was visible to explain that apprehension. It stemmed from
the vista itself, from the grayish purple hue of its shadows, from the sky
that was too low and of a color no sky should be. Most of all, however, it
was aroused in me by the monstrous monument that loomed from the too-near
horizon.

Black this tremendous shape was, the same strangely living black as the
little stone in my vest pocket, and incredibly formed; and there spread from
it an adumbration of menace of which Evelyn was as yet unaware.

"Where is it?" I squeezed through my locked larynx. "Tell me where that
place is."

"Not yet." The little man peered at me with the detached interest of an
entomologist observing an insect specimen. "Not yet," he repeated and it
seemed to me that he was answering not my demand but the thought in my
throbbing brain, the thought that Evelyn was in some nameless danger and I
must go to her to save her from it. "When it is time you will come to me and
learn what you want to know." He thrust a white oblong into my hand.
Automatically, I glanced down at the card.

There was not enough light to read it. I lifted it to catch the reflection
from the portrait—and realized that the man was no longer beside
me.

He was nowhere in the room. He must have gone swiftly out, the carpeting
making his footfalls soundless. Bon-n-ng. The tower clock was striking
again. Muffled as it was, I was grateful for the familiar sound.
Bon-n-ng... Bon-n-ng. It was not the half-hour that was striking, but
the hour! Bon- n-ng. We had not seemed to have been talking nearly
that long. Bon-n- ng. The dull sound welled into the hush of that
painting-walled room. Bon-n-ng... The gong died to silence.

Six! There had been only six strokes of the clock! I had not heard the
first five. That was only natural. My attention had been on the little man.
The clock had struck five times before he was gone and I became aware of
it.

It takes only a small distraction of one's attention to blot out awareness
of a striking clock. I'd been counting those strokes an hour ago. I had
counted four when the little man spoke to me, and yet I didn't recall hearing
the rest of the ten at all.

Four and six are ten!

Nonsense! This I was thinking was arrant, impossible nonsense.
Nevertheless my lifted hand trembled slightly as I turned it to look at the
watch strapped to its wrist.

Its hands stood at ten. At ten o'clock precisely, just as they had when
the little man first spoke to me.

For a long minute the shadows of that art gallery hid the Lord alone knows
what shapes of dread. The painted faces leered at me from the walls
—

All but one. The face of Evelyn Rand, its wistful smile unchanged, its
gray eyes cool, and frank and friendly, brought me back to reason. Her face,
and the fact that behind her I could see no strange, unearthly landscape but
a formless swirl of dark pigment, warm in tone and texture and altogether
without meaning except to set off her slim and graceful shape.

I was still uneasy, but not because of any supernatural occurrence. A
fellow who's never known a sick day in his life can be forgiven for being
upset when he finds out there are limits to his endurance.

For two weeks I had been plugging away at my hunt for Evelyn Rand, and I
hadn't been getting much sleep, worrying about her. I hadn't had any at all
last night, returning from Westchester in a smoke-filled day, coach on the
nerve-racking Putnam Division. I was just plain fagged out, and I'd had a
waking dream between two strokes of the tower clock.

Dreams I knew from the psychology course I once took to earn an easy three
credits, can take virtually no time to go through one's mind. From what I'd
learned in that same course, that I should have imagined Evelyn in some
strange land, with some obscure menace overhanging her, was a symbolization
of the mystery of her whereabouts and of my fears for her. The little man
represented my own personality, voicing my inchoate dreads and tantalizing me
wit I a promise of a solution to the riddle deferred to some indefinite
future. 'Not yet', he had said...

It was all simple and explicable enough, but it was disturbing that I
should have undergone the experience. Maybe I ought to see a doctor. I had a
card somewhere—

A card in my hand was the one I dreamed the little man had given me. It
was real! Objects in dreams do not remain real when one wakes...

Hold everything! There was a rational explanation for this too. The card
hadn't come out of the dream. It had been in the dream because I already had
it in my hand. It must have been in the catalogue. Leafing the pamphlet as I
was absorbed in contemplation of Evelyn's portrait, I had abstractedly taken
it out unaware that I was doing so.

I looked at it, expecting it to be the ad of some other gallery connected
with this one, or of some art school or teacher. It might be the latter but
it didn't say so.

All there was on the card was a name and address:

ACHRONOS ASTARIS

419 Furman Street, Brooklyn

Brooklyn.

There is something solid and utterly matter-of-fact about that Borough of
Homes and Churches, something stodgy and unimaginative and comfortable about
its very name. I stuffed the card among a number of others in my wallet
(lawyers accumulate such things as a blue serge suit accumulates flecks of
air- floated thread) and forgot it.

I took a last, long look at the portrait of Evelyn Rand. My reconstruction
of her personality was complete. All that was left was to find her.

All that was left! I laughed shortly and a little bitterly as I turned to
leave the exhibition room. I had hoped somehow, somewhere among the things
she had touched, the people she had known, the scenes through which she had
moved, to come upon a hint of where and how to look for her. I had found
nothing. Worse, every new fact about her that had come to light denied any
rational explanation of her disappearance.

There was no youth in whom she was enough interested to make the idea of
an elopement even remotely possible. She had manifested every evidence of
contentment with her way of life; quiet, luxurious, interfered with not at
all by the trustees of the Estate. To conceive the sensitive, shy girl as
stagestruck would be the height of absurdity.

No reason for voluntary disappearance that I had been able to think of
would fit into Evelyn's makeup as I knew it now.

Foul play was as thoroughly eliminated. Kidnappers would have made their
demand for ransom by this time. Seventy-third Street had been crowded with
churchgoers that Sunday morning; no hit-and-run accident, with the driver
carrying off his victim, could have occurred unobserved. The police and
hospital records had offered no suggestion of any more ordinary casualty that
might have involved her. The charitable organizations to whom the income of
the Estate of Darius Rand would go were to be chosen by the trustees only
after the event of a lapse of her right to it. Evelyn Rand was the last
person on earth to have an enemy, secret or otherwise.

The more I had learned about her - the less explicable her absence
had become. I was licked. I ought to go back to the office and tell old
Sturdevant to call in the police—I stopped stockstill in the brittle
winter sunshine of Madison Avenue. Tentatively, almost fearfully, I tested
the air with flaring nostrils.

I had not been mistaken. Faint but unmistakable I smelled what I'd thought
I had; the mingled scent of arbutus and crocuses and hyacinths and the
nameless fragrance of dreams. The perfume that was used by Evelyn Rand, and
Evelyn Rand alone.

She was near. She was very near. She had passed this way minutes before.
Seconds, for the delicate aroma could not have lived longer in the gasoline
fumes and the reek of this city street.

I looked for her. Eagerly I looked for the girl of the portrait, and saw a
messenger boy slouching down the pavement, a rotund beldame swathed in mink
entering her sleek limousine, business men bustling past, someone's chic
secretary on her way to the bank on the corner with a deposit book held
tightly in her gloved small hand. A shabbily dressed old man pored over a
tome at the sidewalk stall of a used bookstore beside me. I was in the middle
of the block and nowhere on it was anyone who possibly could be Evelyn
Rand.

The scent was gone and I felt empty inside. Weak. People were turning to
stare at me. A man in a gray Homburg hat and a double breasted dark overcoat
started toward me; if he spoke to me I'd probably pop him on that clipped
little triangle of beard that waggled from his chin. I wheeled to the
bookstall, plucked a ragged volume out of it—anything to hide my face,
to give me a chance to pull myself together.

If this sort of thing kept up I was destined for an asylum. First I'd
seen, talked to, someone who didn't exist. Now I was taking to smelling
things. I tried to recall if I'd ever heard of anyone having olfactory
hallucinations...

The bookworm next to me was watching me curiously. That was because I
hadn't opened the book I'd picked up, wasn't even looking at it. If I didn't
do so right away he'd be sure something was wrong.

The cloth binding was blistered and water-soaked, but the lettering on it
still was distinct. The title of the book was—THE VANISHED!

It was, of course, pure coincidence. Nevertheless the short hairs at the
nape of my neck bristled. It was too damned pat a coincidence for
comfort.

The cover almost came away from the rest of the volume as I opened it. The
paper was mildewed, powdery. I found the title page. The words, 'The
Vanished', were repeated. Beneath the Old English type was a short
paragraph in italics:

"Here are tales of a scant few of those who from the earliest dawn of
history have vanished quietly from among the living yet are not numbered
among the dead. Like so many whispering whorls of dust they went out of space
and out of time, to what Otherwhere no one still among us knows, and
none will ever know."

'Like so many whispering whorls of dust.' Could it be pure coincidence
that those words wavered on this stained page? My fingers were cold and numb
as I turned it and stared at the headings; Elijah, Prophet in Israel. The
Tsar Alexander the First. King Arthur of Camelot. John Orth, Archduke of
Tuscany. Francois Villon, Thief, Lover and Poet. The Lost Dauphin. They Who
Sailed on the Marie Celeste.Judge Crater of New York.

And, How Many Unrecorded Others?

Was Evelyn Rand one of the 'unrecorded others' who have vanished 'out of
space and out of time?' Perhaps, the thought came to me, perhaps somewhere in
this book I may find that hint, that suggestion of what has happened to her
for which I've hunted so long in vain.

Not rational, of course. But remember I was not rational at that moment.
Distinctly not rational, so far from it in fact that once the idea occurred
to me it seemed to me that Evelyn approved, that she was urging me to act
upon it.

I went into the store, shadowed, musty with the peculiar aroma of old
paper and rotted leather and dried glue found only in such establishments. A
gray man in a long gray smock shuffled out of the gray dusk between high
shelfstacks.

"How much is this?" I inquired, holding the volume up.

"Hey?" He peered at me with bleared, half-blind eyes. "Hey?"

"I want to buy this book," I repeated. "How much do you ask for it?"

"This?" He took it in his clawlike hands, brought it so close to his face
I thought he would bruise his nose. "The Vanished? Hm-m—" He
pondered a matter of life and death. Finally he came out with the price.
"Thirty-five cents."

"Little enough." I shoved my hand in my pocket, discovered I had no small
change. "But you'll have to break a five for me," I said, taking my wallet
from my breastpocket. "That's the smallest I have."

"You're a lucky man," the bookseller squeaked. "To have five dollars these
days. Heh, heh, heh." I suppose the shrill twitter was meant for a laugh, but
it irritated me. I jerked the bill from the fold so hard that it brought out
with it a card that fluttered to the floor.

The gray man took the greenback and shuffled off into some misty recesses
beyond the shelving. I bent to retrieve the white oblong.

I didn't pick it up. I remained stooped, my fingers just touching it, my
nostrils flaring once more to the scent of spring, to the perfume of Evelyn
Rand.

The sense of her presence was overpowering but now I knew it did not mean
she was anywhere near. The perfume came from the card I was picking up and
the printed name on that card was Achronos Astaris.

I thrust the card into my coat's side pocket as I straightened. "Keep it,"
I told the bookseller grinning.

"And keep the book too. I don't need it any more." The way he stared at
me, pop-eyed, was excruciatingly funny. I laughed aloud as I strode out of
that musty old store of his. I didn't know where Furman Street was—like
most Manhattanites I thought of Brooklyn as some strange bourne the other
side of the moon—but I'd soon find out. I looked around for a
policeman, saw one standing on the corner observing a bevy of giggling young
females board a bus. "Furman Street," he repeated, scratching his head.
"Never heard of it."

"It's in Brooklyn," I suggested.

"Oh, Brooklyn." He looked disgusted. I felt that I ought to apologize for
wanting to go there but decided not to, waited silently as he stripped off a
white glove and from somewhere in the inner mysteries of his uniform dug out
a dog-eared small book with a red paper cover. "How do you spell it?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I got it. You take the IRT subway. It says here IRT Sub
Borough Hall four blocks west."

"I see." But I didn't, not quite. "Does that mean the Borough Hall station
is four blocks west of Furman Street or that I walk four blocks west from the
station?"

The policeman took off his cap and made a more thorough job of scratching
his head. "Hanged if I know." Then he got a sudden inspiration. "I'll look in
the front of the book."

"When I went to school," I said wearily, "the answers were in the back of
the book. Thanks for your trouble but if it's as complicated as all that I'll
take a taxi."

I hailed one, gave the driver the address and climbed in. For the first
time that day I felt like smoking. I got my pipe out, tamped into its bowl
the mixture that after much experimentation I've found suits me exactly,
puffed flame into it.

The bit was comfortable between my teeth and the smoke soothing. I shoved
over into a corner, leaned back, stretching out diagonally legs too long to
be comfortable in any vehicle. The change of position brought my face into
the rear view mirror and, not from any Narcissism but to relax my brain as my
body was relaxed, I studied it critically.

There are two things that irk me about that phiz of mine. It is
unconscionably young-looking in spite of my twenty-seven years and the staid
and serious mien I assume when I can remember the appearance expected of an
attorney, even a junior attorney, on the staff of Sturdevant, Hamlin, Mosby
and Garfield. Then too, my nose is slightly thickened midway of the bridge,
and there is a semicircular scar on my left cheek, mementoes of a certain
encounter with a son of Nippon who wielded his Samurai sword a bit too
dexterously for my comfort.

Otherwise mine is not too unpleasant a countenance with which to live. I
have a thick shock of ruddy brown hair, eyes that almost match it in hue and
a squarish jaw I like to think appears strong and determined. I'll never take
first prize in a beauty contest, but neither do babes scream at the sight of
me. Not even grown-up ones.

Madison Avenue died and was buried in the Square of the same name. We were
on Fourth Avenue for a while and then on Lafayette Street. The old Tombs
Prison, abandoned now, lifted its formidable granite wall on the left, was
succeeded by the white majesty of the government buildings that front Foley
Square. The Municipal Building straddled Chambers Street like a modern
Colossus of Rhodes and then the blare of City Hall Park was raucous in my
ears.

An overalled truck driver disputed the right of way with my cabby. "Where
the hell do you think you're goin'?" he wanted to know.

Where did I think I was going? Why did I think I was going towards Evelyn
Rand when all the evidence I had of any connection between her and this
Achronos Astaris was the faint hint of her perfume on his card?

Evidence? I was a hell of a lawyer! That card need never have been
anywhere near Furman Street or Astaris.

Hundreds of them must have been inserted between the leaves of the art
gallery's catalogues, and that had been done at the gallery. She'd never been
on Furman Street. She had never heard of this Astaris nor he of her.

But the card carried her perfume. I fished it out, lifted it to my
nostrils and sniffed. All I smelled was paper and ink.

The fragrance had not, then, come from this bit of pasteboard. But I'd
smelled it, I was certain that I had smelled in the street outside that
bookstore and again inside. I was a blithering ass. Evelyn had been in that
store seconds before I'd entered it. I was running away from, not towards
her. "Hey," I yelled to the driver. "Turn around. Turn around fast and go
back to where we started from."

"Nix, fella," the cabby grunted. "It's ten days suspension of my license
if I turn here on the bridge."

"What bridge?" But staring out of the window I saw that we were on the
bridge to Brooklyn and I knew that the ordinance prohibiting a U- turn on it
was rigidly enforced. "Okay," I grunted, resignedly. "Guess I've got to
wait."

That was the longest, most chafing mile I've ever ridden. The noon rush
was just beginning and the roadway was jammed, but at long last the taxi
reached the trolley-cluttered plaza at the other end and slowed. "Well," my
driver growled at his windshield. "Yuh change your mind again or is it go
back?"

"Go on." That wasn't I who'd answered. It was a woman's voice; but so
clear, so imperative that the cab's sudden burst of speed thrust me back into
my corner and before I'd recovered myself it already was wheeling down a
narrow street liberally supplied with one-way arrows.

And with signs that said, TO BOROUGH HALL. Some woman in a car alongside
had said 'Go on' to her own driver and somehow her voice had carried to mine.
Simple. So simple that in deciding it no longer mattered if I delayed an hour
in returning to that bookstore, that I might as well go on and interview
Achronos Astaris, I had no sense of yielding to any guidance outside my own
will.

And then the driver veered the cab to the curb, braked hard.

"I got a flat, buddy," he turned to inform me, quite unnecessarily, as he
heaved out of his seat. "Take me five, six minutes to fix. That's Borough
Hall right ahead there. Mebbe if you'd ask a coupla guys where this here
Furman Street is while I'm workin' it'll save us time."

"I've got a better idea," I grunted. "I'll pay you off now and walk the
rest of the way. According to the cop's book it's only four blocks from
here." I, paid him his fare and alighted. If travelling in Brooklyn was a
matter of asking questions, I could do that with the best.

Asking questions was one thing, getting informative replies another. In
turn a newsstand attendant, a brother attorney hurrying, briefcase in hand,
toward the nearby Courthouse and a bearded derelict standing hopefully beside
a little portable shine-box shrugged doubtful shoulders and looked blank.
Finally, I approached a policeman with some trepidation. If he produced a
little red booklet—

But he didn't. "Furman Street," he said. "That's over on the edge of
Brooklyn Heights. Cross this here street and go past that there corner cigar
store and keep going and you'll walk right into it."

I heaved a sigh of relief. It was exceedingly premature. My brisk pace
slowed as I found myself in a maze of narrow, decorous streets labelled with
such curious names as Orange, Cranberry, Pineapple. I entered a still
narrower one designated College Place and brought up facing a blank wall that
forbade further progress. I extricated myself from that Cul-de-sac,
walked a little further and halted.

I had lost all sense of direction.

From not far off came the growl of city traffic, the honk of horns, the
busy hum of urban life, but all this seemed oddly alien to this street where
I was, this street of low, gray-facaded houses with high stone stoops and
windows shuttered against prying eyes. Years and the weather had spread over
them a dark patina of age yet there was about them a timeless quality, an air
of aloofness from the flow of events, from the petty affairs of the very
mankind for whose shelter they had been erected. The houses seemed to possess
the street so utterly that no one moved along the narrow sidewalks or
appeared at the blinded windows, or let his voice be heard.

I was strangely alone in the heart of the city, strangely cloistered in
drowsy quiet.

Into that quiet there came a low sonorous hoot, swelling 'til the air was
vibrant with it, fading away. The sound came again and I knew what it was. A
steamboat whistle. I recalled that the taxi had not run far from the Bridge,
that the East River must be very near. I recalled, too, what the policeman
had just said about Furman Street's being on the edge of Brooklyn Heights. It
would overlook the River, then, and the direction from which the whistle had
come would be the direction in which lay the thoroughfare I sought.

I turned in that direction, saw a drugstore on the nearest corner, and
started for it. I'd get straightened out there.

The shop was small, low-ceiled, the shelving and showcases white and very
clean. There was no soda fountain. Glass vases filled with colored water, red
and green, stood at either end of a high partition.

I heard the clink of a pestle on a wedgewood mortar behind that partition.
It stopped when I cleared my throat loudly. A dark green portiere moved aside
to open a doorway and the spectacled, white- coated pharmacist came out.

"How do you do?" he greeted me pleasantly, tugging at one drooping wing of
a pair of walrus mustaches. "Warm for this time of the year, isn't it?" He
came leisurely toward me, smiling.

"I wonder if you can direct me to Furman Street."

"Certainly." The druggist took me by the arm, impelled me gently to the
door, opened it. "You haven't far to go, but it makes a difference which
number you want. The two hundreds are that way," pointing, "but it's shorter
to the four hundreds if you go up Plum Street." He indicated a thoroughfare
at an acute angle to the one he'd first gestured to.

"I'd better go up Plum, then," I said. "The number I'm looking for is
four-nineteen."

"You must be mistaken, sir. There is no such number on Furman."

I answered his smile with my own. "But there is. I'm positive that is the
address." I brought the card out of my overcoat pocket and once more read it.
The number was distinctly and indubitably 419. "Look here." I displayed the
pasteboard to the pharmacist. "Isn't that 419 Furman Street?"

The druggist looked at the card. Then be looked up at me, and the smile
was gone from his face. "Listen, old man." His hand was on my arm,
solicitously. "Furman Street is very long and there might be an easier way
for you to get to where you want to go than along Plum. Sit down here a
minute," he led me to a bentwood chair in front of a showcase, "while I go in
back and look up just where four-nineteen is."

I couldn't quite make him out, but he was being so decent to me that I
couldn't argue with him. I sat down and watched him hurry back behind the
partition to consult, as I supposed, another one of those little red
guidebooks.

I was mistaken. I have exceptionally keen hearing and so I caught from
behind that mirrored wall something I definitely wasn't supposed to hear. The
pharmacist's whisper, suddenly excited: "Tom! Grab that 'phone and dial Dr.
Pierce. I think that fellow out there is the patient that got away from his
asylum last night."

Another whisper came back: "How do you figure that?"

"He just asked me for four-nineteen Furman. Four-nineteen, mind you. And
he showed me what he said was a card with that number on it. But there wasn't
any card in his hand. There was nothing in it at all."

"Certainly sounds like a nut," I heard the other whisper respond. "You go
back out there and keep him talking and I'll get Pierce's keepers over here.
Here, you better take this gun along in case he gets violent."

That got me out of the chair and out of that store in a rush. I was a
block away before I slowed and stopped.

There was a card in my hand. By the evidence of
every possible
sense I held the card of Achronos Astaris in my hand. A man who seemed sane
insisted that hand was empty, but I could feel the card in it, see it, read
the name and address printed on it. It was there. I'd found it in the
catalogue of the exhibit where Evelyn Rand's portrait hung.

I did not know that. I'd decided the card had been between the
pages of that pamphlet because it was madness to permit myself to believe
that it had been handed to me during a space of time that occupied no time at
all, by a man who did not exist.

But if the card itself did not exist!

Here it was between my thumb and fingers, white, crisp, unquestionable.
Even if the pharmacist hadn't seen it, others had. The gray bookseller. The
policeman on Madison Ave.

Had they? I had dropped it in the bookstore, had bent to pick it up, but
the near-sighted dealer in second-hand tomes had said nothing, done nothing,
to indicate that he was aware of why I stooped, of what I reached for. Nor, I
now recalled, had I shown the card to either officer.

What if I had not? The card was real, couldn't be anything else but real.
I had been meant to hear the druggist's whisper, saying that it was not. It
was his perverted idea of a joke. The best thing to do about the incident was
to forget it. The card had to be real. The alternative was—

I dared not put that alternative into words, even in thought. I could test
it however, very simply.

I could go to Furman Street and look for number four-nineteen. If it was
there, if a man named Achronos Astaris lived there, I was sane.

My skull felt drained, empty, when I reached that decision. I stared about
me. I saw a lamppost and a street sign stiffly projecting from it. The sign
said, Plum Street. By continuing on the way I was going I would come to
Furman Street, in the four hundred block.

I got moving. This street was as deserted as those through which I had
come. Yet I had a queer feeling that I was not alone in it, that someone was
keeping ahead of me, just ahead, although I could see no one. The sidewalk
curved, climbed quite steeply to brightness about a hundred yards before me.
I thought I caught a flutter of misty blue up ahead, but when I looked more
closely it was gone.

The houses beside me ended and I halted, staring out into the brightness
of sky over water, gazing raptly at the mountainous mass that seemed
suspended in that brightness.

Stone and steel and glass, across the bustling water each gargantuan tower
was separate and distinct, but all were merged in a jagged pyramid that
climbed, colossal in beauty, 'til its topmost pinnacle challenged the sun.
Manhattan's skyscrapers.

After awhile my gaze drifted downward to the swirling, cloudlike haze that
obscured the bases of the skyscrapers and made it seem as though they hung
unsupported in midair.

Strange, I was thinking, that so late in the day the mists still should be
heavy on the Bay, and then I realized that the obscurity was neither cloud
nor mist and that it lay not on the water but on the nearer shore.

What my unfocussed eyes had diagnosed as vapor I saw now was a low
building that faced the end of Plum Street, a low gable-roofed wooden house,
white-painted, with a little green lawn before it. A narrow gravel path went
up through the lawn to an oaken door that made a dark, semicircle-topped
rectangle in the clapboard facade.

One comes upon such relics of a more gracious past in the most unlikely
parts of New York. Mostly, though, they are dilapidated, ramshackle,
mouldering to ruin. This one seemed perfectly preserved. The pickets of the
wrought iron fence around its pocket handkerchief of a lawn were unscarred by
rust, its windows obviously were washed and gleaming even if darkened by the
blinds pulled down behind their panes.

From the center of the roof a small domed cupola rose and around it ran a
narrow, railed balcony.

Recalling something of my school history, I wondered if George Washington
had not perhaps stood on that balcony, spyglass to eye, watching General
Gates' redcoats filling the barges that would bring them across the river to
the Battle of Brooklyn Heights. Perhaps this house had been his headquarters
during that momentous encounter. That would explain its preservation.

On either side of it was a four-storied structure of gray stone, each the
beginning of a row running off to right and left paralleling the shore. In
front of the building to the left—my left—of the gabled wooden
house was a tall brown lamp post and the sign on the lamp post read Furman
Street.

The number painted on the third step of the high stoop of the house behind
the lamp post was 415. The number painted on the third stoop of the stone
house to the right—my right—of the low white house was 423.

The house between them, the house with the little lawn and the balconied
cupola must be, then, Number 419 Furman Street.

As I went across to it some errant breeze lifted a whirl of dust from the
asphalt. It accompanied me across the opposite sidewalk and through the gate
in the tall fence of wrought iron. It whispered about me as I went up the
path and although I felt the gravel crunch under my feet there was no other
sound in the hush than the whisper of that tiny whorl of dust.

The high portal, oak darkened by the years to the tone of old leather and
to its secret glow, opened smoothly, silently before me. Without hesitation,
almost as though I were no longer master of my own movement, I stepped
through the aperture into cool dimness.

The door thudded dully behind me. It shut out the city's low murmur, so
omnipresent that I had not been aware of it 'til now it was gone. It was as
if a barrier had come between me and the world I knew.

Passing from the bright winter sunshine to this semidarkness, I was
temporarily blinded. I halted, a bit bemused, waiting for sight to be
restored.

I could make out no detail of the place where I was. I could see only a
gray, featureless blur. But I had an impression of spaciousness—of
space really. Of a vast, limitless space that by no imaginable means could be
confined within the four walls of a house. Of a space that could not be
confined within the four points of the compass!

Abruptly my thigh muscles were quivering and the nausea of vertigo was
twisting within me! I seemed to be on the brink of a bottomless chasm. If I
took another step I would hurtle down, forever down. The impulse seized me to
take that step, to hurl myself, plummeting, into that illimitable abyss
—

Hold it, Johnny March! I told myself, voicelessly. Hold everything! This
is only the hall of an old house. In a moment your pupils will adjust
themselves and you will see it—walls papered with the weeping-willow
design you've always liked, hooked rugs on a floor of axe-hewn planks,
perhaps a graceful balustraded staircase—

Subconsciously I must already have been aware of all this, for the very
foyer I described took shape out of the formless blur. The design I
remembered from the Early American Exhibit of the Metropolitan Museum
patterned the faded walls. Wide planks made the floor, rutted with decades of
treading feet and keyed together by tiny double wedges of wood, and their
dull sheen was brightened by oval rugs whose colors were still glowing
despite the years since patient hands had fashioned them. Directly ahead of
me the wide staircase I had imaged rose, gently curving, to obscurity above,
its dark rails tenuous and graceful.

"Well," I said, turning to the person who had admitted me. "This
is—" I never finished the sentence.

No one was there. No one at all!

Someone had opened the door for me, and no one had passed me, going away
from it. But of course whoever it was had slipped out the door, as I
entered.

Was Brooklyn inhabited exclusively by practical jokers? This one wasn't
going to get away with it. He couldn't have gotten far. I grabbed the
doorknob, determined to go after him.

The door didn't open. It was locked! I was locked in!

That was going too far, much too far. I—

A silken rustle behind me twisted me around. I started to say just what I
thought of the proceedings—My mouth remained open, the angry words
dying unspoken.

Down the stairs from above were coming tiny feet, a froth of lace, a
circular billow of foaming lace that could only be the hems of the
multitudinous petticoats women wore in the days when this house was built.
Then the filmy blue of a wide hoopskirt descended into view, a pointed bodice
tight on a waist my hand could span.

I shook my head, trying to shake the cobwebs out of it. What the devil was
this?

The crinolined maiden paused on the stairs, a slim white hand to her
startled bosom. For a moment the shadow of the ceiling was across her face,
and then I saw it, whitely luminous against the dark background of the
stairs.

It was the face of Evelyn Rand! The soft red mouth was tight with pain,
the gray eyes peering down at me were haunted with a strange dread; but this
was the face that had looked out from the portrait on Madison Avenue...

She wasn't there any longer. She wasn't above me on the stairs. She hadn't
retreated, startled by my cry. She had blinked out, in the instant it
had taken me to get across the floor and three steps up.

Something was left of her. A faint sweetness on the air. The scent of
spring. The scent of dreams.

Of dreams. Was I at it again? Had I only dreamed that I saw her?

"Not quite," a low, toneless voice said behind me. "She was not there, but
neither did you dream that she was."

I wheeled, my breath caught in my throat.

Just below me at the stairs' foot, vagrant light from somewhere gleaming
on the polished scalp of his too-large head, his lashless and disquieting
eyes pinpoints of flame in the gloom, was the little man of the art
gallery!

MY FINGERS DUG INTO the rail they had grasped to pull me up
the stairs.
That at least was firm and hard. That at least was real.

"Less real than I," said the little man who twice apparently had
materialized out of nothingness. "The staircase exists only as you have
conceived it. So do the walls about us and the floor on which you see me
stand."

I'd not spoken aloud the thought to which he responded. Was he reading my
mind?

"A crude way of phrasing it," he answered that unspoken thought, "but as
near the truth as you can comprehend." Damn him! He was laughing at me. I
knew he was laughing at me even though his round face with its
artificial-seeming skin was as still as a modelled mask. He was—Hold
on, John March. You're in that dream again, that confounded dream. What you
think you hear him say is just the answer of one part of your mind to the
thoughts of another. You no more see this odd human than just now you saw
Evelyn Rand—

"Wrong," the little man said. "You saw her, or rather a projection of her
that I presented to you in order to ascertain if what I already had observed
is a constant of your psyche or an aberration."

I could not be dreaming that. I had no idea of what it meant. "The hell
you say," I flung at him to conceal my growing apprehension. "What am I, some
kind of guinea pig with which you're experimenting?"

A faint, mocking smile brushed his still lips. Or did it? "Exactly," he
murmured.

That enraged me. "Experiment with this," I yelled and leaped down at him,
my fist flailing straight for his round, inhuman face—

It whizzed through empty air! My feet pounded on the floor. The little man
had vanished—

Sound behind me whirled me around. The fellow was on the staircase, three
steps up. He was exactly where I had been, an instant before! But how in the
name of reason had he gotten there? He couldn't have passed me, he couldn't
possibly have passed me. To get to where he was he would have had to go up
the steps at the same time, by the same path, I had plunged down them. Two
bodies cannot occupy the same space—

"Matter can be in one place and then in another," he said in the slow,
patient way one explains some complex idea to a child, choosing phrases
suitable to its limited comprehension, "without ever having been anywhere
between. Even you should know that. Or are you not acquainted with the
observations on the behavior of electrons that already had been made in your
time."

"In my time! What time?"

"The Twentieth Century, as you reckon it." I had the curious feeling that
he was speaking of some period in the remote past. "I am certain our
researches are correct on that point."

I shook my head. He couldn't be saying that, he just could not. It didn't
make sense. With my confused sense of wrongness about all this was
mingled a sort of baffled exasperation. Damn him! He was coldly amused by my
bewilderment.

Queer! No flicker of the muscles in his face, no changing light in his
black and piercing eyes, revealed that to me. But I was as aware of his
amusement as though he had laughed aloud. Was I too, very dimly, beginning to
learn to do without speech? Was I tapping some subtle current of
communication that 'til now I had not even suspected to exist?

"Who are you?" I blurted. "Who the devil are you?"

He was growing tired of this colloquy between us. "If you must think of me
by a name, Achronos Astaris will do." He had stopped playing, was coming to
the nub of his purpose with me.

"What, John March, is it that has impelled you to forget everything else
in your desire to find Evelyn Rand? What is it that makes her a necessity to
you, so that without her you are not complete? What is it that has made
ambition, the anxiety for preferment, pride in the occupation you chose for
your lifework, insignificant compared with the need you feel for her? What
force is it that draws you to her with a strength greater than the attraction
of gravity, greater than the thirst of the sodium ion for the hydroxyl group
it tears even from water? What chemistry of the emotions has governed your
actions since she became real to you?"

His eyes, his dreadful, probing eyes, demanded an answer. "I love her," I
flung at Astaris. "God help me, I have fallen in love with her."

I had not known it 'til that moment, had not realized it. But it was true.
I was in love with the girl for whom I had been searching so long, the
girl whom I'd never seen, with whom I had never spoken.

"Ahhh," Achronos Astaris breathed. "I know that the name of your reaction
to her is love." For the first time I sensed a wavering in the clear, cold
surety of him. "But what, precisely, does that mean?"

I glared at him, anger once more mounting within me. His eyes gripped mine
with a hold almost palpable. He was invading the most secret recesses of my
being, was stripping naked my very soul.

Melodramatic phrases, but no phrases less turgid would fit.

"It is most puzzling." Did I hear Astaris say that or was I reading his
thoughts? "There is something more than physical chemistry, more than
biological tropism, involved. It is plain that he has an urge to hold her
naked against his nakedness, to merge—"

"Damn you!" I yelled, outraged. "Damn your rotten, prurient mind," and the
wrath that exploded in my brain hurled me up the stairs to smash him
—

I smashed instead against—nothingness! Against a wall invisible,
immaterial, but as impenetrable as though a screen of armor plate had sprung
up between me and the little man.

Still so possessed of wrath that I did not apprehend its full enormity, I
clubbed at the unseen barrier with my fists. There was no sound of impact,
none at all, but my knuckles were bruised and bleeding. I kicked at empty air
and saw the toes of shoes buckle against nothing I could see. Exhausted, I
put palms against it and felt perdurable nothingness warm as though it were
animate flesh, vibrant with some ineluctable life, impenetrable as
granite.

And all the time Achronos Astaris watched me with a cold, mildly
interested detachment, as some scientist might watch a Siamese fighting fish
batter its nose against glass inserted into its aquarium to bar it from the
other Betta it has marked as its victim.

He sighed now as I hung, panting and weak against the invisible partition.
"You learned quite quickly. There is a definite advance in five hundred
years."

I stared at him too choked to speak by anger that had not subsided at
all.

Oddly, while Astaris was still clear and distinct as he had been, the
staircase, the ceiling and the walls were fading again into the gray,
shapeless blur out of which they had formed. I glanced down, anger giving way
to panic! There was only grayness beneath me, empty grayness! I looked
behind. Nothing was behind me but a fearsome gray vacancy. I was enclosed by
it, suspended in it. Once more the terror of height possessed me, the
vertiginous, heart- stopping awareness of an unfathomable abyss into which I
must plunge when Achronos Astaris released me.

For, wheeling again, I had found his eyes upon me, pulsating pinpoints of
black flame, and it seemed to me that only those eyes held me where I was.
Not the eyes but an impalpable something, a Force unknowable, that merely
manifested itself in those eyes as it reached through the infrangible barrier
that had frustrated my attack on Astaris, and embraced me.

And those eyes were not only holding me there, suspended. They were
dissecting me, not my body but my ego? soul?—the me that is not
physical yet lacking which I would not be. Keen, cutting lancets, they were
peeling layer after layer from my psyche, searching, searching for something
that was there but that they could not find.

Anger they found, and fear, and bewildered awe transcending fear, but that
for which they probed they could not find. Gradually they faltered, at a
loss. And then I was aware that Astaris had given up his search, that he was
sending a message out into the boundless ether, that he was waiting for a
reply.

I do not know, even yet, how I knew all this. I know only that for a
little while I had the power, and that I was soon to lose it.

"No," the answer came. Not a voice. Not sound at all. Naked thought from
an infinite distance. "Send him to us, but you must remain yet awhile."

Astaris did not like that. I was aware he did not, but I was aware also
that he would submit. Abruptly fear flared into terror, into such paralyzing,
agonized terror that it rocked the very foundations of my mind.

Now! NOW! Astaris' eyes released me! Astaris himself was
obliterated by an inward swoop of the grayness. It swirled about me, and I
was enveloped by a dizzy darkness.

Not darkness! An absence of form, of color, of reality itself. I was
falling through nothingness. I was not falling. I was caught up in
some vast maelstrom. I was whirling through some spaceless, timeless
non-existence altogether beyond experience. I was rushing headlong through
incalculable distances, distances beyond comprehension, yet I knew myself to
be altogether motionless. The Universe had fallen away from me, was somewhere
behind me, light centuries behind me. I was beyond life. I was beyond death.
I was beyond being itself.

The catapulting rush through infinite distances that were not distances at
all, the headlong flight that was static as the stars, ended as it had begun;
without jar and without transition.

There was solidity beneath my feet. There was vision once more in my eyes.
I was John March again and I was back to reality.

Reality? I stood on a slight eminence in the center of a desolate plain
across which a jumble of shattered, great boulders stretched to a horizon
strangely too near. There was something—incoherent was the word that
rose in my mind—in the shape of the rocks, in the dim hues of their
fractured surfaces, and their shadows were not black as shadows ought to be,
but a grayish purple. They lay in dark pools about the shattered rocks and
the light that made them streamed sourceless out of a sky too low for any
normal sky.

The sky weighed upon me as a storm sky would, heavy and ominous, but
although no star hung in it, no moon nor star, it was lucidly transparent so
that I knew no cloud mass made of it the lowering dome it was. And it was
informed with a color such as no sky ever has had, an earthy and fathomless
brown that seemed innate in the very air.

The brown lucence bathed the plain, wan and shimmering, and it dawned on
me that the wrongly shaped rocks marched toward and past me across the plain
as though once they had formed endless collonades and anciently had been
smashed by some unimaginable cataclysm. And it seemed to me that in the
gray-purple shadows of the rocks Things lurked so outrageous in shape that
they had crawled into the deepest shadows to hide even from themselves.

Strangest of all, this landscape seemed vaguely familiar.

A sky too low? A sense of imminent threat? I felt, I swear that I felt
fingers brush my eyes and in memory I saw a slim, graceful shape and behind
it —

This was the vista that momentarily I had seen, or thought I had seen,
form out of the dark, amorphous background of the portrait of Evelyn
Rand.

My pulses hammered. Evelyn was somewhere in this gaunt and brooding land.
As surely as I knew that I was here myself, I knew that somewhere here was
the girl I had sought so long, the girl that in the last few terrible minutes
—I'd learned I loved. Somewhere, there had been a landmark in the
fleeting glimpse I'd had of this land in the art gallery on Madison Avenue. I
turned slowly, searching for it.

And found it.

It loomed against the horizon of the strange low sky, an immensity hewn
out of some starless night somehow solid. Black as night and as lustreless,
it blotted out a full quadrant of the horizon to which I'd turned, a stygian
escarpment deeply scarred and awesome in grandeur, and I now saw that the
shattered pillars marched to it from every point of the compass and that
their final coming together was buried beneath a black detritus of fragments
riven from the monument by the same catastrophe that had destroyed them.

Fragments? They were masses huge as houses and myriads of them were piled
in that wide, nocturnal tumulus, yet so tremendous was the shape from which
they'd been torn that its configuration had been altered only as much as
weathering may alter some heroic statue.

A statue it was, vast beyond any concept of vastness, but of what?

Its haunched body, on whose flanks the skin hung in pendulous folds that
were mountainsides in themselves, was a beast's. Its legs—the hinder
ones miles-long ridges folded under the colossal body, the fore-limbs soaring
towers—were an animal's in contour and posture. But the tremendous head
was not that of a beast.

Nor was it human.

It was sunk neckless between the figure's shoulders. It was wide- jawed,
lean-jowled. The eyes were hooded with a black, scalp-tight hood, yet somehow
I was aware of them, aware of the waiting that brooded in them as long as all
the centuries that have been and will yet be, the patience endless as
Time.

Impossible to describe that stupendous countenance whose very wrinkles
were ravines, impossible not to read in its lineaments a knowledge that
transcended the inner mysteries of the Universe and probed to where Space
itself ceases to exist.

Limned in that face was all Good. And yet—

And yet stupendously below it, where the curve of one sculptured paw rose
out of the jumbled shards, was the shattered outline of another figure
modelled out of some pinkish and fleshlike stone. This was the representation
of a man and he was contorted in unendurable agony, and into him were driven
the monstrous claws to pin him down.

Good above, Evil below. Love above, Hate below and the esoteric knowledge
in the vast countenance was that in the eternity-long progress of life from
its inchoate beginnings to its ultimate goal, Good and Evil, Love and Hate,
are one and the same.

How long I stood immobile, scarcely breathing, possessed wholly by that
wonder, I shall never know. How long I might have remained in its spell I
cannot tell, for abruptly I was torn from it by the rattle of small stones
behind me and a deep-chested, ferocious bellow.

I snatched up a fist-size stone as I whirled, saw that the avid roar was
not meant for me. Near the base of my mound a man rolled, scrabbling to
regain his feet, and a gorilla leaped toward him, would reach him before he
could possibly do so.

With some unformed idea of distracting the shaggy brute I let out an
incoherent yell and started running across its line of sight. The beast
twisted, saw me, bounded not towards me but angling to intercept me; and as I
realized that the slope was steeper than I thought, that I could not change
direction. I discerned also that he was no beast. A furry pelt was draped
across the hairy torso and over its big-thewed shoulder, and his huge
calloused hand clutched the wood handle of a flint-beaded axe.

A yard from me, that axe lifted—I flung my stone, and by sheer luck
it struck the Stone Age weapon's head squarely, jolted it from the dawn man's
grip. But I could not stop my impetuous rush, plunged headlong into him. I
got in one blow that might have been the flick of a butterfly's wing for all
the effect it had on him, and then his shaggy arms folded me to his barrel
chest and constricted, drove the breath out of me, squeezed my ribs. Sight
dimmed—

I was on my knees, hanging head down on arms that knuckled the stony
ground, and the dark bulk shuddering to lifelessness on the ground here
beside me incredibly was the Neanderthal man who'd almost taken my life.
"Ve vous remercier," a light, almost musical voice said above me,
"A fond de ma couar je vous remercier."

It was the man whom the brute had pursued who thanked me for saving his
life. He wiped blood from a long and slender poniard with a lacy but tattered
kerchief, and his spindly legs were sheathed in long hose of maroon silk
laddered by runs. A sort of vest with sleeves wrapped mangy blue velvet about
his meagre chest, and the ruffles at his neck and sleeves were ragged and
dingy.

He scabbarded his poniard at his belt and bent to me, his sharp featured,
predatory countenance anxious, and spoke again in his queer, archaic French
which, oddly, I had no difficulty in comprehending. "You are much hurt, my
old?"

"No." I let him help me up. "Not much." He seemed to understand my English
as well as I did his French, for he looked relieved. "Seems to me it's I who
ought to thank you, mister. I'd have been done for if you hadn't sunk that
dagger into him."

"But no." Under a wide brimmed hat, its plumes fluttering, his hair was
gray but the scar of an old slash gave a permanently raffish twist to his
mouth, and his cheeks, blued by stubble, were sunken and emaciated. "It is my
life that I owe to you, monsieur, and though it has many times been declared
forfeit to the King's justice, I still set upon it a certain value." The
sidewise cant of his eyes was slinking and furtive but in them was a certain
dark sparkle of gaiety and about his lank, bony figure there was a swaggering
devil-be- damnedness altogether intriguing. "If you had not come to my rescue
you would not have been in danger so great."

He swept that wide hat from his head and brought it to his breast as he
bowed. "I salute you, monsieur. Such clan, such courage I have not often seen
in a life perhaps too much filled with episodes that have required them." He
returned the hat to his jauntily cocked head. "If I may have the honor of
being made acquainted with your name?"

"John March," I told him, somewhat dazed by this ebullience.

"John March. I shall not forget it when once again I set about my Grant
Testamente. A vilanelle, perhaps, to express my gratitude. I
shall—"

"Your Grant Testamente!" I blurted. "A vilanelle? Who are you? In
the name of all that is holy, who are you!"

"There is very little holy about me." A bitter smile twisted the man's
thin mouth. "Or so the abbot of Paris would hold. A jailbird, a liar, a
thief. A consort of slitpurses and doxies. A picklock, a runagate o'nights
and a lack- brained clerk by day. And-". He straightened, and drew pride
around him like a cloak. "And a poet of sorts, I hope. My name—for what
it is worth —Francois Villon."

"Villon!" I gasped. "You're kidding me. Francois Villon died four hundred
years ago."

"No," the man in doublet and hose said. "Villon did not die. His sins
overtaking him at last, he was banished from his beloved Paris. He trudged
out through the Porte Sainte Jacques, all he possessed on his back and in a
starveling packet under his arm. He plodded out on the Orleans road, weary of
life, weary unto death. Though the day was breathless, a tiny swirl of dust
whispered towards him, and," once more he bowed, "here you find Francis
Villon. Not dead. Most assuredly not dead."

"But—" I still could not bring myself to believe him. "But four
centuries. It is impossible!"

"Nothing, my friend," interrupted Francois Villon, "is impossible. Least
of all in this land where Time—He paused.

"Yes."

"In this Land," he began again, "where Time is not."

"Where Time-! What do you mean?"

"That, my friend, you will learn—too soon." Villon was once more
furtive, his eyes sliding away from mine as he said, "Suppose you satisfy the
curiosity that is ever a flame burning within me, and burning me. You are
from Britain?"

"No," I answered. "From America." I recalled that the Western Hemisphere
had just been discovered in his day, that he might not know the name. "From
the continent, Columbus discovered—"

"Yes," he cut in. "I know. She has told me of it. The maiden with the hair
of honey and the gray eyes that hide laughter and dreams."

I grabbed his arm, my fingers bruising the thin flesh. "You've seen her,
talked with her!" I could hardly get the words out. "She is here."

"She is here indeed. I—" He stopped abruptly. He was looking over my
shoulder, and his face was suddenly pallid.

"Where is she?" I demanded. "Take me to her."

"No," Villon responded, and his voice was hollow with fear. "I cannot take
you to the fair Evelyn. I cannot take you anywhere. For our hosts appear. I
had thought to escape them, but they have found me and they have found you,
and now there is no longer any hope for us, or for Evelyn Rand, or for that
pleasant world into which we were born and which we shall never see
again."

The air burst into an infinitude of darting sparks, green and blue and
yellow and scarlet. My skin prickled sharply. Somewhere a white orb blazed.
It was the hub of the sparks that immediately whirled about it in countless
threadlike circles of luminance that merged into a solid shining disk. This
drew in upon its dazzling center.

It was no longer light at all but a Shape, a Thing grotesque and weird and
incredible, where nothing had been seconds before.

Francois Villon was laughing. There was no amusement in his
high, thin
laugh, but a sort of wild despair and a sort of madness. Mad indeed was that
which had materialized out of a whirl of coruscant light and poised now
before us.

It was almost all head, three-quarters a huge ovoid head; yellow- gray
skin naked of hair drawn tightly over a monstrous skull. Two enormous eyes,
lidless and lashless, swam with an oily iridescence. The head's face had no
nose, unless two black orifices just below its midpoint were nares. A round,
tiny mouth beneath these putative nostrils was innocent of lips or teeth.
Where ears should be, two circular areas of skin pulsed as though the brain
within momentarily would burst through membranes too frail to restrain
it.

The rest, invested by some dark hued, horny integument, was a bulbous
torso out of which grew two boneless tentacles each terminated by splayed and
writhing branches—caricatures of hands. Legs there must have been also,
and feet of sorts, for the apparition stood upright as a man stands.

"Voila, John March," Villon chuckled, "he who calls himself
Kass."

It was that chuckle, I think, the amazing effrontery of it, that set my
thought processes going again. I did not really see this thing, I told
myself. I was the victim of a hypnotic illusion induced by the whirling
lights and the white blaze at its center. It was not, it could not be
real.

I dragged the side of my hand across my eyes, and looked again, and the
great head was still there, its bulging eyes fixed upon me. In their gaze was
the same hard, impersonal speculation I had so resented in Achronos Astaris.
Somehow more dreadful it was now, for Astaris at least had been human, while
this...

"I am human," Kass broke in. "A million years more human than you." He did
not say it. The words were within my own mind, a thought perceived,
not heard, but it must have come from him. I could not have formulated
it.

Moreover, Villon heard the soundless message too. "A million years more
human than you or I," he drawled to prove it, his accents slurred. "Look
well, my friend. See to what all mankind's aspirations, all mankind's
strivings, shall bring us in the end." My gaze shifted to him. A sardonic
grin twisted those thin, scarred lips of his. "In truth there must be a God,
for only God could play so bitter a jest."

What they were saying seemed so much grim nonsense, but before I had time
to react to it I became aware that Kass's attention had swung to Villon, and
I sensed that Kass was puzzled. Once more I was reminded of Astaris, of how
when the strange little man had demanded from me the meaning of love I had
felt him to be troubled by some queer urgency, by some driving need for a
knowledge that was denied him.

"Why do you not fear me?" Kass was inquiring of the Frenchman. "There is
the consciousness of utter defeat in you, and despair, but you do not fear
me. Why?"

"Fear you?" Villon murmured, insolence in the cant of his narrow head,
divine contempt in the stance of the scrawny frame on whose bony angles hung
his tattered finery. "I? Who have made a ballade of love's betrayal and a
villanelle of torture's rack? Who have metered a rondeau by the clatter of my
best friend's bones swung from a gibbet, and flung a roundelay to the rabble
with the hangman's knot under my own left ear? Fear you? I who have listened
to the music of the Universe and dreamed the dreams of the angels and the
damned?

"There is that within me Lucifer cannot touch, nor the God your existence
blasphemes destroy. I have gone up into a Heaven of my own devising and down
into a Hell of my own imagining, and you can show me no terrors I have not
known aforetime. Fear you? I am a poet."

He slapped the face of Kass with his mocking laugh, and there was a hush
that was not of sound alone. Or there may have been some reply, but I did not
know of it, for in that instant the corner of my eye caught furtive movement
among the rocks and my look slid to it, my head not turning.

I glimpsed them only for an eye-blink before the shadows hid them, but in
that split-second I saw them clearly and I knew I could not be mistaken,
though reason insisted I must be. Reason, even with the animate, tangible
presence of Francois Villon to confute it, insisted I could not have seen a
knight in chain mail and a forester in the brilliant green of Sherwood Forest
peering from behind a boulder's jagged edge, gesturing to me not to betray
them.

I did something then that until that moment I should not have dreamed
either possible or necessary. I deliberately blotted what I'd seen out of my
consciousness, made myself think of something else at once; of the way the
pallid and sourceless light glimmered on the round of Kass's skull, of how
his monstrous shadow was a grayish- purple like no shadow I had elsewhere
seen.

And I did this just in time, for once more he was reading me. "Matters
stranger to you than the color of a shadow there will be to wonder at," he
remarked, "before we are prepared to deal with you." It is difficult to
convey the feeling of—nakedness—given one by the realization that
one's thoughts are exposed to another. "Come. The Council awaits me."

"Lead on, fellow," I said, trying to get jauntiness into my tone. Villon
had set me an example of courage I was ashamed not to emulate. "Whither thou
goest I shall go." I rather suspected I wouldn't be very successful if I
objected, and, too, I had a pretty good hunch that wherever he wanted to take
me would bring me nearer Evelyn Rand.

No. All this weirdness into which I had been plunged had not driven the
thought of her from my mind. Rather it had multiplied many times my anxiety
for her. If she were here, and in the power of creatures like this...

A stinging prickle netted my body. Kass's fingers were touching my
shoulder; his other hand gripped Villon. "Come!" It was as if abruptly I was
at the heart of a maelstrom of some electric force. Panic struck at me. I had
felt this same sensation at the moment the grotesque being appeared. Was I
about to dissolve into a whirl of flashing, multi-colored sparks?

Nothing happened. Nothing except that the rocks about, the ground beneath,
abruptly were flowing past us. We were motionless. It was the plain, the
horizon, that moved. A sharp, twanging sound came from my left. Kass's touch
was gone and the speeding earth pulled my feet from beneath me. I pitched
forward headlong. Falling, I twisted, saw the writhing fingers that had
released me pluck something from the air. A feathered arrow!

My shoulder hit the now motionless dirt. "Up, St. George!" a deep-
chested voice bellowed, metal rattling through it. "Have at thee, hell
spawn!" The burly, mailed figure I had glimpsed lunged out from behind a
rock, his linked gauntlets sweeping a great two-handed sword down upon our
captor's sickly-hued, immense skull. "Die, caitiff!" someone else cried, and
a lithe green figure leaped past Villon, also fallen, and thrust a dagger at
Kass's great eye.

The knight's broadsword shattered into a thousand clanging shards; the
forester's knife, arrested in blank air, shivered as though it had jabbed
into the trunk of an oak.

Neither blade had touched Kass, though the latter had not moved by the
tenth of an inch. No one was moving now. All the fierce motion had stopped;
the pounce of the ambushers from the covert which the flow of the landscape
had brought to us, the skid of our momentum that had taken Villon and myself
yards along the suddenly halted ground.

The scene held. Kass; one tentacle lifted to grasp the arrow, the
membranes at either side of his gargantuan eves a trifle distended, no other
sign of emotion about him. The knight; bladeless hilt clutched in
chain-gloved fists, longskirted cloak of iron mesh enveloping columnar legs
straddled to give foundation to his futile blow, all his head but his
swarthy, hate-darkened face swathed in metal fabric, all his immense strength
impotent. The other, the forester—

He was a lithe and slender arc, fluid movement abruptly rigid. His shoes,
of some soft, chamois-like leather and pointed of toe, were green. His taut
legs were tightly sheathed to the waist in the emerald of May leaves and his
sleeveless leather jerkin repeated the hue as did the fabric that puffed
about his shoulders and enveloped his extended arm, thrusting a dagger into
the nothingness that held it. In spite of a flame-colored beard his
countenance was youthful and debonair, though contorted now by a furious
despair. The green, conical hat he wore sported a cocky, crimson feather.

Curious how one's mind works sometimes. There was in mine at that instant,
not disappointment at the failure of the ambush I had anticipated and done my
best not to betray, not consternation at the manner in which Kass had
defeated it, but only a sort of dazed amazement at the anachronistic
assembling of the figures in that strange tableau.

The cut of his coat of mail dated the sword-wielder as from the twelfth
century. It was in the fourteenth that the Lincolnshire lads prowled Sherwood
Forest attired in the green the forester wore. Francois Villon's Paris was
that of the fifteen hundreds, and I—my birth date was the year nineteen
hundred and twenty. Kass aside, we represented eight centuries of history.
Eight hundred years! Absurd! They were masqueraders—

What of the Dawn Man I had fought and Villon had slain? That slavering
brute had been no actor. Abruptly I was cold with recollection of the
Frenchman's words: "Nothing, my friend, is impossible in this Land Where Time
is Not," and then I was cold with something more imminent; a sound, a
toneless squeal so shrill that it was at the upper threshold of hearing, a
high, thin whine that pierced my ears and set my teeth on edge. It came from
the tiny, puckered mouth that seemed so ludicrously inept in the vast yeasty
expanse of Kass's visage and it was the first actual sound I had heard him
utter.

It went on and on like a wire pulling through my brain, a blue fine wire
that was all edge, all wounding edge. It flickered out into the dull,
desolate glow brooding over that plain of tumbled rock and ominous shadows,
and somewhere out there it found a response. Somewhere from among the
malformed boulders, from among the gray- purple shadows that lurked at their
bases and filled the mouths of their caves with mystery, something was
answering Kass.

I rolled, tried to find the source of that second thin whine. My straining
eyes could discover nothing alive in all that dreary tumulus. I saw only
vacant chaos, only the gaping empty maws of caverns filled by impenetrable
shadows.

The shadows were lengthening. That was queer, here where there was no sun
to lower; then I realized that only one of the shadows was lengthening. It
was flowing like a dark cloud, out of the mouth of a nearby cave. Like a
gray- purple fog that somehow had more substance than a fog, it still was
formless as drifting mist.

"Pater Noster in excelsis..." I heard Villon mumble a Latin prayer.
And then I heard him gasp, "A drina. God preserve us! I thought they were
chained to their lairs by the light."

The cloud parted from the shadow and was a shapeless blob about the size
of a small auto, moving more and more swiftly toward us. The tenuous whine
that answered Kass's call came from it. It was animate with a blind and
groping sort of life, yet it had no shape. Or rather its shape was constantly
changing as it billowed toward us, as once in a microscope I had seen the
outlines of an amoeba change. Because of this it had no identity, but
individuality it had in full measure, and a terrible malevolence.

Kass's call rose shriller. The approach of that purple-gray mass grew
swifter, and something in the sightless way it moved made me more certain
that were it not for the strange sound Kass made it would not have appeared,
and having appeared would not know which way to move. I could see it more
clearly, could see now that near its center there was a throbbing spot of
deeper purple that did not change in shape, and I was afraid.

I was deathly afraid of the thing Villon had called a drina. I was
afraid of it because, for all its formlessness, for all its blindness, I
sensed intelligence within it, and I knew that intelligence was different in
some terrible way from the intelligence of any creature I'd ever known.

Its shrill whine had an eager sound now. It rushed past me and two heart-
stopping screams twisted me about!

Knight and forester hung high above the ground, each wrapped around the
waist by one of Kass's pipestem tentacles. They were puppets with jerking,
boneless limbs, with white masks on which the features had been ineptly
splotched, so little of human had terror left in them. The drina boiled
toward them.

Kass flung them down and the gray-purple mass rolled over them. Rolled
over them and—rolled past where they'd fallen, and they were no longer
there.

I saw them! I saw them sprawled within that monstrous purple bulk, forms
blurred and indistinct like shapes seen in a pea-soup fog—and still
alive! Still moving. And then, as the pitch of Kass's squeal changed,
I saw them melt.

The drina was scudding away towards the nearest shadow-pool, reached it,
merged with it. It was gone, and mailed knight and green- clad forester were
gone, and there was only Kass, poised here, motionless and silent now, to all
appearances already oblivious to what had occurred.

On the ground between him and the cave into which the drina had vanished
lay the bladeless hilt of a two-handed sword, a dagger, and a heap of iron
links that still retained the empty shape of a man. That was all...

"They were fools," I heard Villon murmur. "But they were
brave fools. May
God rest their troubled souls."

"Amen!" I managed to say.

Kass was gesturing for us to rise. I shoved shaking hands against the
ground to obey, but I was sick, mentally and physically sick. I must have
looked it, for the Frenchman, misunderstanding, said as he rose lithely.
"There is nothing for you to fear, my friend. Not, at least, 'til you have
served the purpose for which they have brought you here, or until, like those
whose passing we have just looked upon, they have found you useless for that
purpose."

"They!" I snapped. "Who are they? And what do they want from me?"

"He is one of them," Villon answered, nodding at the approaching Kass,
"and the others are as like him as I am like you. They say they are men, as
you have heard, and they say that between them and us stretches a million
years and more of time. How that can be I do not know, yet neither do I know
how it can be that we two are met, living, and nearly of an age though four
centuries divide our natal days. If this smaller miracle can come to pass,
why not the greater?"

Before I could answer that Kass reached us and laid his splayed hands on
our shoulders. At once my body was again stung with countless prickles, and
the landscape was once more moving past us.

It accelerated rapidly 'til the plain and the rocks and the sky itself
became nothing but a streaked, brownish blur whizzing past us. We were not
moving at all, it was everything outside of us that moved. I felt not the
slightest intimation of that inner awareness of motion that the psychologists
call the kinesthetic sense. There was nothing around me, nothing to protect
me, yet there was no wind on my face ... Wind! At this unguessable speed the
air should have been a solid thing, driving the breath from my lungs, tearing
the clothes from my back.

It was, I thought, as if somehow we were detached from the Earth and it
were spinning beneath us.

"You are not upon Earth at all," Kass's soundless voice told me. "You are
no longer in its space nor of its time."

"What do you mean?" I yelled. "What in hell do you mean?" I shouted
because I was frightened, because I was desperately afraid—and hated
myself for it.

"It shall be explained to you, if the Council so decides." Kass seemed to
be coldly interested in my agitation, in the way I might have been
interested, watching a puppy growl at its image in a mirror. "You have, in
what you already know, a foundation for comprehension of the matter such as
is possessed by none of the others Astaris has sent us, except one. The
female from your own generation."

The female! Did he mean Evelyn? The landscape about us was slowing! I made
out that we were in a narrow, rugged ravine whose rocky walls were speeding
past us.

Then these were gone, and there was no longer any motion.

Some five hundred yards behind us was the towering tumulus that had sped
past us. Between it and us stretched a plain level and uncluttered as a
concrete highway at dawn.

Ahead, and too close for comfort, the ground dropped sharply down as at
the edge of a precipice and I was staring across miles of sheer vacancy to
another plateau. There was a shimmering, dreamlike quality about this, an
appearance, I discerned, due to my seeing it through a peculiar quiver of the
air that rose from the curving edge of the chasm to the low, brooding sky.
Like a vast, transparent curtain this was, intangible yet very real.

"Down, my friend," the Frenchman said softly. "Look down."

I stepped a little nearer the verge of the cliff. I looked down—a
thousand feet, two thousand! I saw nothing but rock, gently curving inward,
glass-smooth rock glimmering with high polish. My sight slid down another
thousand feet and another, to where that astounding wall curved inward and
levelled out to become the bottom of a vast bowl, a mile deep and five miles,
I was to learn, across the diameter of its circling rim.

I have mentioned once, I think, the effect of height upon me. Now the
illness seized me; my stomach went plummeting down into that yawning gulf. My
muscles lost all strength. I toppled forward over the brink of that awful
precipice... I did not fall. I hung, arms sprawled out, a scream choked in my
throat, my skin clammy with the sweat of terror. I hung above that sheer and
terrible drop, and I was sustained by nothing I could feel or see.

Kass did not seem to notice but Villon pulled me back and stood me erect
on legs gone rubbery, and he smiled at me and said, "You could not fall, my
friend."

Our captor's bulging eyes were unfocussed, he was motionless as if
absorbed in some weird voiceless communication with someone I could not see.
I pulled in breath. "What do you mean, I could not fall?"

"The Veil of Ishlak," Villon gestured to the shimmering curtain that was
no more substantial than the quiver of heated air above a railroad track in
midsummer, "will not permit you to. So look down without fear, my friend,
upon the city of Adalon while yet there is time for you to see what manner of
place it is to which your fate has brought you."

I gritted my teeth and peered over that brink once more. Nausea still made
me most unhappy, but because I knew now that I could not fall, the vertigo
did not blind me. I took it by easy stages, let my eyes drift slowly down
along that infernal wall.

My first impression of its smoothness was confirmed. The contour of the
precipice was utterly regular, too regular to be natural. This abysmal pit
had been quarried out of the solid rock—not quarried. There were no
marks of tools or blasting. It seemed, rather, that the huge depression had
been hollowed out by a heat so great that the unwanted stone had boiled into
vapor and steamed away.

That was, of course, manifestly impossible, but how otherwise the
formation could be explained I did not know. My gaze reached the level floor
of the bowl. I saw the city of Adalon, dwarfed by height and laid out for me
like a map.

Its structures were of the same color and texture as the rock, as though
they had not been built but had grown or been moulded out of it. They were
square and squat and ugly and no attempt at beautification, no thought of
anything but utility, was evident in their design.

One, at the very center of the circular area, dominated all the rest by
reason of its vastly greater size, and differed from them also in having a
domed roof instead of a flat one. There were eleven other buildings. They
were of varying sizes and they were scattered about the bowl's floor at
varying distance from the hub, yet I had a curious sense that they were
located according to some definite plan, and that the plan had some meaning
for me.

"Like a sow and its rooting piglets," Villon murmured, "are they not? And
see, some of the piglets themselves have their own offspring clinging
close."

"Yes." Except for the central building and the two nearest it, each of the
structures of Adalon had other smaller ones very near to it. The third had
only one, the fourth two, but there were nine about the fifth.

The sixth also had nine—but these were connected by a wide-topped
circular wall in which they were embedded like scattered stones in a ring.
"Saturn," I exclaimed. "The ringed planet. The planet with nine satellites
and a ring." Now I knew what Adalon's design represented. "The biggest
building at the center is the Sun. Mercury, nearest it, and Venus, have no
satellites. The Earth, third away, has one moon, Mars has two, and Jupiter
nine. It works out, by George, it works out. The three the other side of
Saturn would be Uranus and Neptune and Pluto. Don't you see it, Villon?
They've built their city in the pattern of the Solar System, of the Sun and
its planets."

He looked at me rather queerly. "The Sun and its planets," he whispered.
"Aye, it seems to me that once I heard the rector of the university prate of
this Mercury and Venus and Mars whereof you speak, and Jupiter too, as stars
in the sky of nights, though those other names are strange to me. The Sun and
its planets," he repeated. "Now is there some meaning here? I have wondered
why they builded thus, higgledy-piggledy, when all else they do has a
straight design serving its purpose and no more."

There were little flecks of light between his drooping lids. "Can it be,"
he whispered. "Can it be that these men a million years older than us, to
whom love and beauty and even awe of their Creator are things forgotten and
unknown, have yet some sentiment left? A nostalgia, perchance, for the skies
they have forsaken, for the orbs that gave them birth?"

He had some other thought, some thought he was as carefully blotting out
of his consciousness as I had blotted from mine the thought of the ambush
that had failed so disastrously, and for the same reason. But what he had
said was enough to make me grab his arm, my fingers digging in.

"Look here," I demanded. "Don't tell me you've swallowed all that stuff
Kass has been spilling. That this isn't the Earth, and they're men of the
future, and the rest of it."

Villon shrugged, expression draining from his narrow countenance. "It is
what they say and they do not lie. There is much about them I do not know,
but of one thing I am certain. To the Ishlak in nothing is sacred save the
Truth, and the Truth to them is Divine."

I almost believed it all, in that moment I almost believed that Kass and
the others who had built Adalon were men of a million years from my own time,
that this strange place was not on Earth, that it was beyond the Solar
System, perhaps beyond even our Galaxy. But not quite. It was too much to ask
a man to believe, too much to ask him to conceive. All that one has been
taught cannot be discarded in a single hour no matter how crowded that hour
has been with happenings that seem to controvert the very essentials of one's
philosophy.

Or was it an hour? Was it not years, a timeless time, since I'd walked
along a Brooklyn street—"Listen, Villon," I exclaimed, recalling why
I'd walked along that street. "Twice you've mentioned Evelyn Rand. Was it
down there that you met her?"

"Aye," he replied and the sparkle was back in those black eyes of his.
"She brightened that city of dread so that one did not quite so much miss the
sun."

"Okay," I growled, my pulses pounding. "If she's in it, city of dread or
no I'm going down there."

"Yes" Villon sighed. "I think you are." He pointed a long finger down to
the dome of the central structure, and in that great hemispherical roof a
hole was opening, irislike. "I doubt me that you will like much what you find
there, yet I would give my hopes of salvation, such as they are, if I were
awaited as you are in Adalon."

A silvery something leaped out of the aperture of the roof
of the
structure I'd likened to the Sun. It shot, on a long, steep slant, straight
for us, and so fast was its flight I could see nothing of it but blurred
light streaking the air.

In the next instant it was hanging before me, absolutely motionless, in
midair. Long axis horizontal, it was cylindrical, one end blunt-tapered like
the nose of a bullet, the other square-cut. It was nine or ten feet long,
about five in diameter. It seemed to be made of some metal that was a little
grayer than silver, and it hovered there without visible support of any
kind.

The only man-made things I know of that might approximate this feat are
the balloon and the helicopter. No balloon could have moved with anything
like the speed this had, nor could one have been brought to a standstill with
such abruptness. It was no helicopter either. It had no whirling windmill
vanes. In fact, I could make out no protruding part of any kind. The thing
simply and unequivocally defied gravity.

I had just about time to note this and to become aware of a curious whirr
that seemed to come from the object, when at its nose there was a quick
succession of crimson sparks. At once I heard a long, ripping sound, like
silk tearing.

"The Veil has parted," Villon answered my startled look, gesturing to a
still place in the curtain of shimmer, like an oil slick on water. The
projectile leaped inward, hissed along the ground, was static again beside
Kass, who seemed to be rousing from his absorption. The whirr cut off.

"They call it a stratcar," the Frenchman told me. "I went to my
knees in prayer when first one sprang upon me." Impish amusement danced in
his eyes, and he chuckled. "I was persuaded that Lucifer in very person had
arrived in it to claim my soul, so many times over forfeit to him."

A pale inner glow wavered over the surface of that about which he spoke,
like waves of luminosity fluctuating over the surface of superheated steel,
yet within a long stride of it I felt no heat. A white line was stripping
along its side, from truncated rear to where the taper of its prow began.

"The magic art," Villon's chatter continued, "by which they cause the
ground itself to flow past them, miles in a twinkling, appears to fail them
at the brink of this chasm. To reach their Adalon from here they fly down to
it in this iron contrivance. They fly, mark you. Now this indeed fills me
with doubt of my senses, for while magic is a proper matter recognized by all
theologians and metaphysicians, for a man to build an engine that flies, goes
against Nature. Yet I swear to you, my John, that this stratcar is no uncouth
bird but a thing wrought out of metal."

The line that slashed the side of it was widening. The upper half of the
stratcar's curved skin was sliding up and around. From within it, toward the
front, projected the big head and bulbous upper body of a goggle-eyed
individual who might be Kass's twin except that the hard-looking stuff
covering his torso was a brilliant orange instead of the dark brown that
clothed the other.

Kass's tentacles lifted in what was evidently a salute. The newcomer
imitated him, perfunctorily. Then I realized that they were conversing,
though I heard nothing, aurally or within my skull.

"Kass seems pretty damned respectful to this new goon," I remarked. "Who
is he? Mayor of Adalon?"

"He calls himself Daster," Villon replied. I thought I detected a puzzled
note in his voice, and his eyes were narrowed. "The hue of his singlet marks
him as a Doctil, as that of Kass tells that he is a Plebo.
Daster is one of the Kintat, the Council of Five who rule this land,
and that he should come to meet us is passing strange. Does it mean that
something has occurred to change the even tenor of their ways during my
witless attempt at escape from them?"

I had already begun to suspect that the membranes at the sides of the
heads of the Adalonians were their sole features that might be said to have
expression. Those of both were vibrating rapidly, seeming to confirm the
poet's idea that they were disturbed.

Their colloquy ended, Kass swung to us. "Go," he commanded. "Into the
stratcar."

Villon shrugged. "It appears that you are to have your wish, John." He
started for the strange vehicle and I followed him. I can't say that I was
very comfortable at that particular moment. I didn't like being ordered
around, for one thing. And for another, Villon's warnings had convinced me
that some very unpleasant experiences were waiting for me in the place to
which I was about to be taken.

But Evelyn Rand was down there. There were two seats inside the stratcar,
very much like those of an auto. Daster occupied the front one. I got into
that in the rear, alongside Villon. I was surprised that the conveyance did
not roll as I pressed down on its side, climbing in. It should have, balanced
as it was on its rounded bottom. It certainly should have. But it was rigid
as though that bottom lay flat against the ground.

I turned to see what would hold it steady when Kass got in, but he did
not. His tentacles lifted in repetition of the salute with which he'd greeted
Daster. The latter answered him, and then the Plebo was moving away. We were
moving away from him, rather, though in relation to the ground we were not
moving at all. The mouth of the ravine across the plain swallowed him.

"Didn't he say that the Council was waiting for him?" I exclaimed.

"Yes," Villon breathed. "And that too is strange, for they do not easily
chanore their plans. Something indeed is not as it should be in Adalon. Has
it any meaning for us? Dare we hope-?" he cut off, and I knew that once more
he was veiling his thoughts.

Ignoring us, Daster reached forward to a bank of buttons on the back of
the stratcar's nose, that was a circle-edged wall before him. The vehicle's
side-wall slid tip from beyond Villon, slid over and came down on my side. We
were at once in absolute darkness, a blackness that seemed to thumb my eyes
with palpable weight.

The lightlessness lasted only a second. Daster's grotesque head was
silhouetted against a greenish, spectral glow. The wall in front of him had
become a luminous screen on which, about the level of my chest, rows of
buttons were spots of scarlet. Above these, vague blurs took form, became a
picture in grays and blacks of the plain outside, the high, rocky cliff that
edged it.

They have radar, I thought. But this is more highly developed than any I
know.

The Doctil touched another button. The stratcar filled with the whirr I
had heard as it hung in midair. Villon gasped and caught at my arm, his
fingers digging in.

The whole structure within which we were enclosed was vibrating in
correspondence with that whirr. I was thrown to the right, hard against the
carside, and Villon against my own left side. The photo- like scene on the
screen was whisking to the right and I realized that the stratcar was
spinning around to point at the Veil through which it had come.

The pressure against my sides eased. The screened image was steady again.
Past Daster's head it photoed space and beyond it the distant rim of the bowl
within which Adalon lay. My ears seemed stuffed with that infernal whirring.
It rose in pitch and I was forced against the back of the seat. Blankness
flashed over the screen... was replaced at once by a picture of a vast,
glass-smooth, curved precipice leaning precariously toward us... shifting
into a view of the bowl bottom lifted in a disturbing slant so that the
buildings seemed about to slide off it.

Those buildings ballooned in size with breathtaking swiftness. It was we
who were catapulting down to them, of course, with heart- stopping speed. The
acceleration was a weight crushing me against the seat-back, crushing in my
chest. Pluto flicked off the screen-edge. Uranus. Saturn. The screen showed
only the immense rounded dome of the House of the Sun, a lustrous convexity
against which we were going to smash!

A black splotch spotted the exact center of that roof-image, widened to
swallow it. I could breathe again. I was no longer crushed in my seat. The
whirr had ended. Light was coming into the stratcar, a bar of daylight
cutting horizontally across the right hand wall, and widening rapidly. A bar
of white sunlight, not the drab, oppressive glow out of which we had just
come.

The stratcar's upper half slid over and down beyond my seatmate. The
poet's eyes were closed. He had slumped, motionless and limp.

I grabbed for his shoulder. "Villon," I exclaimed. If something had
happened to him..."Francois!" I realized how much his indomitable
cheerfulness, his insouciance, had endeared him to me in the short time I'd
known him. If I was still sane it was because of his jauntiness, his gay
fatalism.

His eyelids fluttered open and a rueful grimace twisted his mockina lips.
"Thus one must fall," he murmured, "when the gibbet trap is sprung from
beneath one's feet. But at the end of that drop is at least oblivion,
provided the executioner has rightly knotted his noose. Aye, more merciful is
the gallows' drop than that which awaits us."

"You've got hanging on your mind a devil of a lot," I snapped.

"And so would you, my John," he grinned wanly, "if you had been condemned
to hang as often as I have been."

I twisted to a touch on my shoulder. It was Daster's splayed hand. He had
climbed out of the stratcar and he wanted me to do the same. We were in a
barn- like room, its floor apparently of the same fused and congealed rock
that formed the sides of the bowl. The illumination was not sunlight but came
from a wide, shining band circling the walls just where the domed ceiling
rested on them, walls that lacked any sign of door or window.

Our stratcar was one of many that stood in a straight row across the
chamber. Three Adalonians were clustered about a machine whose nose had been
stripped of its metal covering to reveal an intricate mass of gears that they
seemed to be repairing. They were, judging by the brown of their torso
covering, Plebos, but an orange-clad Doctil was coming toward us.

He reached us as I dismounted from the stratcar. "Gohret," Daster greeted
him, lifting his tentacles in salute. "This is John March, whom Astaris' last
message concerned."

Gohret's great eyes rested on me very briefly, shifted to Villon who by
now stood beside me. "And the other, of course, is the one who was lately
found missing," he remarked. "I understand that the scanners located him near
the entrance whorl."

"Exactly," Daster agreed. "And so Kass was able to pick up both at once
and bring them to the brink together."

"Have you determined how this Villon succeeded in penetrating the Veil of
Ishlak?"

"No. Kass reported that he evidently has learned how to conceal his
thoughts from us. We shall have to probe his mind in the observation
cell."

"Which must be done at once. We must find and punish the Plebo who
assisted him. If it was a Plebo." Seeing the two together in that bright
light I realized that there was a definite variance in their appearance,
difficult to describe but differentiating them sufficiently for recognition.
"I shall take charge of him and have the matter attended to immediately."

It seemed to me that Daster resented Gohret's dictatorial tone, but he
said nothing to confirm this impression. "Come along," Gohret commanded
Villon. "Unless you wish to tell us now that which we want to know."

Francois' lip curled scornfully. "I am too experienced a jailbird to be
frightened into blabbing by hints of torture."

"We are not compelled to resort to torture," Gohret responded, "to obtain
information we desire. Our methods are more—efficient."

Villon winced. In spite of your pretty speech about a poet and fear, I
thought, you're scared, my friend. Hellish scared. That's because you don't
know what they're going to do to you and that excellent imagination of yours
is working overtime.

"Come along," Gohret commanded again, reaching a long tentacle for
Francois. The latter shrank back against the stratcar and the Doctil's
writhing limb wrapped around him. Villon's mouth gaped in a soundless scream
as agony grayed his face. I swung a fist at the Adalonian. Its knuckles sank
into squashy, rot-soft flesh under Gohret's tiny mouth and my other fist,
driving in, was caught in midair as Daster's arms roped me, lifted me from
the floor. I kicked back at him, furiously. My heels crunched. Pain rayed
through me, traced every nerve in my body.

I hung from those terrible tentacles, paralyzed, halfblinded and,
inconsequently, resenting it that the Plebos had not even turned from their
work to watch me fight.

"Thank you, my friend," Villon called, his voice thin with his own agony.
"You meant well but you could have done me no good, no good at all." Gohret's
tentacle grooved the poet's scrawny chest and on the back of Villon's
dangling hand blood trickled from the crushed flesh of his arm. "You cannot
help me." They were sinking, visibly they were sinking into the floor and
unless I was mistaken—I must be mistaken—the floor rose along
their bodies undisturbed.

"Farewell, John March." He was smiling. He actually was smiling up at me,
the indomitable fellow, only his shoulders and his head and his plumed hat
still visible. "Tell the fair Evelyn that though I go now into eternal
darkness I take with me the recollection of the gray-eyed Angel I met in
Hell."

The floor was solid over where Francois Villon had
vanished. Daster set me
down and the power of my muscles returned and the agony of my nerves
faded.

I was alone in that stratcar hangar now with those strange beings that
were so unhuman in appearance and yet so oddly human. I was alone and, I
admit it without shame, I was afraid.

It was my turn, now, to be punished. For striking Gohret. For kicking at
Daster. I faced around to the remaining Doctil, doing my best to stand
straight, forcing myself to look into his mucid eyes. They were coldly
impersonal. They lay upon me for what seemed a long time, altogether without
emotion. Astaris had looked at me like that, and Kass, and slow resentment
welled up in me again at the sense of inferiority that steady, speculative
gaze inflicted upon me.

Daster's arm lifted in a gesture, and I knew I was to go with him—
somewhere.

We started moving across the hangar floor, myself a little ahead. The
Plebos to one side busied themselves with their task, not for one instant
interrupted.

Where was I being taken? We were walking directly towards the opposite
wall of that vaulted chamber, and there was nothing there but the blind face
of the stone. It was so highly polished that it reflected us, vaguely. There
was no seam where it rounded into the floor. Floor and wall and dome were of
one piece, like concrete that had been formed in a mould. But they were not
concrete. They were rock. How could rock have been poured that way?

"True enough." Aeons ago, I recalled from my geology, the Earth itself was
molten, shaped into an orb by the very speed of its spinning, bulging at the
equator because there the centrifugal force was the greatest. "But the heat
that melts rock is so great that it would be impossible for men to shape it,
in such large masses at any rate."

"Nothing," the Doctil answered, "is impossible to man."

"You-!" I stopped short. I was face to face with my reflection in the
wall, another half-step would bring me against it.

"Go on, John March." His hand on my back shoved me forward, gently. I went
into that rock... Not against it, into it! It impeded me no
more than so much air, but for a moment I was blinded by intangible grayness.
Then there was light again and I was in a narrow corridor that spiralled
downward, the pitch so steep that I had to lean back and dig heels to keep
myself from going too fast.

"What—what the devil!" I couldn't help the exclamation. "How did
that happen?"

"Matter is not really solid," Daster answered, "as you should know, but is
composed of vibrating electrons separated by spaces compared to which their
own sizes are minute. The rate of vibration of the wall rock has been
adjusted so that the electrons of which we are composed may flow through,
between its particles."

"It's as simple as all that, is it?" I tried to be sarcastic. "Good thing
the boys in Sing Sing don't know about it or they'd walk out some fine
morning."

"Precisely. Except that the technique of changing the vibration rate of
the prison walls would have been beyond the ability of even the most profound
scientists of your time. That was not developed until some five hundred years
after your period."

"Oh yeah?" I wasn't going to let myself be worked up again by the way
these people kept tossing the centuries about, regardless. "Just a little
matter of five hundred years." If I let myself believe that time had folded
into itself, Daster and his friends might really be a million years beyond me
in evolution. The inevitable implication of that would be that I was up
against people I could have no hope of fighting. And I wasn't ready to admit
that, not quite yet. "Just the day after tomorrow to you."

"No," Daster dissented, dryly. "The day before yesterday."

Now what could I do about that except shut up? We kept on going down and
around, and though my own footfalls echoed within the confines of that
interminable spiral, the Adalonian's movements were soundless. A Latin tag
came out of my high school days—facile descensus Averni, greasy
is the descent to Hades—and the speculation trailed across my mind that
perhaps I had died in that old house on Brooklyn Heights; that, a disembodied
soul, I wandered through some Afterland beyond death.

Abruptly the passage leveled out under my feet, straightened out. Far
ahead there was a tiny oblong of the same curiously brownish light that had
pervaded the plain above. It grew larger swiftly, although I was walking at
an ordinary pace. I realized that all this time my footing had been moving,
without vibration, an endless belt spiralling down from that lofty stratcar
hangar.

The rectangle of light ahead became a squared opening at which the tunnel
ended. I was through it, Daster's touch on my elbow keeping me from falling
as I left the conveyor. I half-spun, saw that I'd emerged from an aperture in
a blue-gray wall, lifted my look and saw that wall towering, windowless,
tremendously above me.

So great was its height that it appeared to lean appallingly forward, to
be about to hurtle down upon me. I whirled away from it, faced the wide
expanse of the bowl floor down on which I had looked from the brink of the
sheer, mile- high cliff that closed it in. Directly ahead, across a perfectly
level stretch of fused rock, was a low building, blue-gray and windowless
like the one out of which I had just come, but tiny in comparison to it. To
my right and quite a distance farther off, there was another, somewhat
larger, and to one side of it one about a quarter its size.

If I recalled correctly the layout of Adalon seen from above, the nearer
structure was...

"Mercury," Daster supplied. "Correct. And the farther one is Earth, with
its Moon. Mars is hidden behind Sun. You are the first of our—guests
—to perceive that Adalon is planned to portray the Solar System." He
seemed approving, and I could not help being a little pleased with
myself.

"You call the buildings after the planets they represent?" I noted.

"Yes," the Doctil agreed.

There were a few Plebos about, grotesque caricatures of humanity with
their tremendous heads, their bulbous bodies, their writhing, tentacular
arms. They were moving briskly across the terrain in various directions, but
they weren't walking. They stood on little wheeled platforms of the same odd
metal of which the stratcars were built, and these were rolling swiftly along
the trackless pavement. I could see no steering wheels or other means of
control; the peculiar vehicles stopped and started and changed direction
almost as if they were endowed with some queer life of their own.

One, somewhat larger than the others, and unoccupied, came toward us. It
was like a child's playcart, except that it had no sides, but at the front
end there was a boxlike protuberance from which rods ran to either end of the
forward axle. As it neared I heard a low burr of machinery. It came up to us,
wheeled around and stopped.

"They're worked by remote radio control," I decided, remembering a
demonstration I had seen in New York's Museum of Science and Industry. "But I
can't see the advantage. It must require an operator for each one and..."

"The rider of each rado is its operator," Daster interrupted,
motioning for me to get on to the thing and doing so himself. We faced
forward on it and it started rolling smoothly towards Earth. "I summoned this
one, for instance, and am directing it now." It deftly avoided collision with
another, whose Plebo rider lifted his tentacles in salute to Daster.

"Where's your sending set?" I challenged skeptically. I was getting more
used to the Doctil's weird appearance, more aware of him as an individual
with whom I could talk naturally, whom I could question. "You haven't
anything in your hands and certainly you can't be hiding it anywhere about
you."

"My brain is the only sending set I need for the rado."

"Oh now, listen! You don't expect me to believe that, do you?"

"I do. You have information and intelligence enough to understand it. Even
in your time it was already becoming known that the processes of the brain
and nervous system are essentially electrical in character. My control of the
rado through what you would call will alone is merely a projection of the
same manifestation of energy by which you wiggle your great toe."

"I get it," I exclaimed. "Just as radio is a development of telegraphing
over wires. Then... then your means of communication, my hearing you without
your speaking aloud, must be something similar."

"Precisely. Except that in that case your brain is acting as a receiving
unit. It has not yet evolved sufficiently for it to be used efficiently as a
transmitter, although our researches seem to indicate that some among those
of your time did have that power in a rudimentary manner."

"There have been some experiments with it," I recalled. "At Duke
University, for instance. They call it telepathy, extra-sensory perception,
and—" I broke off. We were being carried past the House of Mercury.
Coming around from behind it and turning towards us was another rado like the
one we rode. On this, beside a Plebo, was a man like myself.

Not quite like myself. He was much taller, built in a heavier mould. His
colossal frame was clothed in a flowing dark robe down whose front flowed a
luxuriant, silver-white beard. His massive features were swarthy, broadly
sculptured, his nose wide-winged and bent-ridged, his brooding eyes sunken
beneath shaggy white brows. I thought of Rodin's statue of Jehovah in the
Metropolitan. There was about this man the same Semitic cast of countenance,
the same consciousness of majesty, the same quiet strength.

His rado, shot by us and ran swiftly toward the great building we'd just
quitted, too swiftly for me, startled as I was, to call to him. "Who is
that?" I demanded, twisting to Daster. "Who is that man?"

"His name is Elijah," was what the Doctil responded. "He was known as a
Prophet of Israel in the age to which he belongs."

"But..." I gasped. "But Elijah was taken up to Heaven in a chariot of
fire."

"So it was reported by Elisha, his disciple, who saw him go. The sun
struck through the whirlwind of desert dust that parted them and gave it the
appearance of flame, and when it was gone, Elisha too was gone." And then,
quite simply, quite convincingly, Daster the Doctil said, "I saw it. I was
there."

Francois Villon! Elijah! A pattern, a faint and appalling pattern, was
forming at the back of my brain. Elijah:

Prophet in Israel. Francois Villon: Thief, Lover and Poet. I had
read those names not very long before. On a yellowed, crumbling page they had
been, part of a list headed, The Vanished. And on the page before that one,
in rubbed italics, had been words that now took on a heart-squeezing
significance:

Like so many whispering whorls of dust they went out of space and out
of time, to what Otherwhere no one still among us knows, and none will ever
know.

"None will ever know." But I knew. Very terribly I knew where Elijah and
Villon and I had come. And Evelyn Rand.

This, this Adalon, was that incredible Otherwhere out of space and out of
time!

The rado rolled up to the grayblue wall of the building
called Earth,
stopped. Daster dismounted and I followed, my mind occupied with trying
really to comprehend the conclusion to which it had come.

There was an opening here like the exit from the gigantic central
structure. The Doctil waited for me to enter this before him. Inside there
was a tunneled passage similar to the one in the House of the Sun, lit
similarly with a twilight glow. But the floor of this did not move. The
corridor went in about five feet, turned sharply right. It did not rise as
that other had but went straight on. I walked along it too shaken to be fully
aware of what I was doing, too shaken to be curious about my surroundings or
my destination.

Up to the moment when Daster had told me the long-bearded man in the dark
mantle was Elijah, and I had believed him, I had neither accepted nor
rejected the actuality of any of my strange experiences. Perhaps I can best
explain what I mean by an analogy. Once, on Okinawa, a shell fragment slashed
my leg. I sat on the ground staring at the inch-deep gash in my flesh, at the
blood welling out of it and for minutes had absolutely no emotion about it at
all. I knew it was my leg that was sliced to the bone. I knew it was my blood
pouring out. I knew that it was beginning to hurt damnably but all of that
seemed to concern me not at all. Then someone had yelled, "Hell. They got the
lieutenant," and visions had smashed into my brain of that leg having been
chewed up so badly that it would have to come off, of my going around on
crutches all the rest of my life.

A medic had put a tourniquet on me in a hurry, that time, and penicillin
and plasma and the miracle men they call Army surgeons had made my leg good
as new more quickly than I'd had any right to expect. But this thing I was up
against now was different. Nobody was going to get me out of this mess.
Nobody could. It was strictly and entirely up to me, myself.

That was a laugh! These people in whose power I was, these Adalonians, had
demonstrated themselves to be masters of forces I could not even begin to
conceive. The Adalonians could read my thoughts at will, could sense them
almost before I was aware of them myself. Against them I was far more at a
disadvantage than the most benighted Australian aborigine had been against
the invading white man equipped with all the knowledge and the tools of
civilization. I was finished. Kaput. Done for. It was fantastic to imagine
that I could do anything against them. Anything at all.

If I behaved myself, did exactly as they told me, maybe they'd let me live
for a while. That was the best I could hope for.

"You have come to a wise decision," I heard behind me. "You are quite
helpless, and your realization of that will save you a great deal of
difficulty." I actually heard someone say that. It was no echo inside my
brain, it was sound, a voice, in my ears! I twisted around.

It wasn't the Doctil I stared at, my jaw dropping. It was a man properly
proportioned, properly clothed in a brown suit very much like my own. He was
about my height too, but he was older than I. Gray- haired, high-foreheaded,
blinkingly near-sighted, he had a distinctly professional air. He might just
have stepped out of some university lecture hall.

"Who-?" I spluttered. "Who are you? Where did you come from?"

He smiled rather vaguely. "I am still Daster," he said in that thin, old
man's voice. "I have merely assumed this appearance because I have found that
my real form disturbs the natural reactions of the person we are about to
join, and it is important that this should not happen. Now, if you'll step
aside so that I can get to that door..."

There was a door, an honest-to-goodness wooden door with a knob of
black glass, beside me where an instant before there had been only blank
wall.

Daster stepped by me to the door. It is an index to my state of mind that
I found more astonishing than his metamorphosis, more surprising than the
sudden materilization of the door, the fact that he lifted his hand and
knocked on it. The familiar, sharp rap of knuckles on wood was startling.

Someone inside said, "Come."

I knew that voice, though I'd never heard it before, and my breath caught
in my throat. Daster's blue-veined hand was on the doorknob. He was turning
it. It seemed to me I was watching a slow-motion film, of a knob turning, of
a door swinging open. It swung outward toward me, so that it blocked my view
of what was behind it. Daster went past its edge, was screened by it.

Very faint in my nostrils was the perfume of arbutus and crocuses and
hyacinths, and the evasive scent of leafbuds, the fragrance of spring in a
countryside I could never hope to see again. And underlying this was the
redolence I could not name, the very breath of dreams.

"I have brought you someone," I heard Daster say, "whom I know you will be
happy to see." I realized that I was going past the edge of that door, that I
was going into the room on which it had opened.

She was standing with her white fingers to the soft round of her breast,
her lips half-parted. There was an attitude of expectancy about the poise of
her slim, young body, a look in her cool gray eyes that seemed to say she had
been waiting for me all the time I had searched for her. She was not
beautiful. Even in that moment I knew that in the ordinary sense of the word
she was not beautiful, her features were too irregular for that, her mouth
too generous. But her hair was a misty amber cloud, and the throbbing curve
of her throat was a lilting line of melody. There was strength in her small
blunt chin and in her face an aching sweetness.

"We haven't. I have never seen you. But I know you. I am one of your
guardian's junior attorneys and I've been hunting for you for all of two
weeks."

"Two weeks?" Her little frown of puzzlement was intriguing. "I don't
understand. If Mr. Sturdevant wanted to get in touch with me why didn't he
call me up? He knows my number and I was home 'til yesterday morning."

"You were..." I stopped myself. Something queer here. Something very
queer. Daster was watching us. I didn't like the way he was watching us. His
eyes were too glittering, too feverishly eager. "Of course you were," I said
vaguely. "I... I confused you with another client.

"I shall leave you," the Adalonian interrupted. "I have some matters to
attend to." He was moving toward the door. "I shall return in a little
while." Turning to him, I became aware of the room, a quietly furnished
living room; rugs, furniture, very like those I was accustomed to all my
life. Except for one thing. There were two other doors, but there was no
window. No sign of one.

The door closed on Daster, and I was alone with Evelyn Rand.

She'd come close. Her fingers were on the back of my hand, cold. "Tell
me," she breathed. "What did you mean when you said you have been hunting for
me for two weeks?" Her pupils were widening and the color was draining from
her lips.

"I said that I was mistaken, didn't I?" It was clear that she was
bewildered, and afraid. "Another client..."

"You said that, but it isn't true. A veil dropped over your eyes when you
said it." Her hand had closed on mine now, was clinging to it. I wanted to
take her in my arms. I wanted to hold her tightly, to still the flutter of
her pulse in her neck, like the hurried beat of a frightened bird's heart.
"Tell me what kind of place this is. Tell me who they are, in there." Her
free hand jerked to one of the closed doors. "Tell me what's happened to
me."

All the strength was running out of her, all the courage. She was on the
verge of breaking. The Lord alone knew how long she'd been holding herself
together by sheer will, how long she'd been facing down her fears. She'd been
surrounded by a strangeness she could not understand and she'd held her
terror of it tight within her. Now I'd come, someone she recognized to be her
own kind, and abruptly the burden had become too great for her.

"Easy," I told her. "Take it easy." The truth would be better for her,
kinder, than any lie that probably would be disproven at once. But what
was the truth? "I don't know very much about it myself but I know
there's nothing to be scared of. We're both in something of a mess, and we've
got to be brave and sensible and figure out together just what it is and just
how to get out of it."

The idea was to let her know that she had help, but also to make her feel
that she had to take hold of herself and cooperate. It was like rescuing a
drowning person. If you let them go hysterical on you they'll go down and
drag you with them, but if you get across to them that they've got to do
something for themselves you can get somewhere. It worked. She let go of my
hand, straightened and smiled wanly. "I ... I'm all right now." But there was
still dread under the surface of her eyes. "You... are you a doctor?"

"A doctor? What makes you—" And then I got it. The poor kid! "Look
here." I took hold of her shoulders. "Look into my eyes, and listen to me.
I'm not a doctor and this is not a sanitarium and you're not crazy." I said
that slowly, with all the conviction I could put into it. "You're as sane as
algebra. Not only you, but the man who told you he is Francois Villon is
sane, and the man who calls himself Elijah is sane. That is who they really
are, unbelievable as it may seem."

I knew she'd spoken with Villon, and I guessed that she must have spoken
with others out of time. It was quite natural for her to think them suffering
from delusions. From what he had said she must have seen Daster in his real
shape, and been convinced that she too was the victim of hallucinations. The
only reasonable conclusion would be that this was a madhouse and she an
inmate.

"You believe me," I went on. "You must believe me. Whatever else is wrong,
you are not mad. Do you believe me?"

She nodded.

"Say it. Say it aloud. 'I know that I am sane. Whatever has happened,
whatever is going to happen, I am sane.'"

"I know that I am sane." Her voice was just above a whisper, her lips
tremulous. "Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen, I am sane."
But her eyes were more natural now, the fear was gone from them. "Thank you,
John March. Oh, thank you."

"Nothing to thank me for yet. Wait 'til I've gotten us out of this." I
made myself sound brisk, confident. I was very far from either. About two
minutes ago I'd decided that I hadn't the slightest chance of extricating
myself from the predicament in which I'd found myself, had resigned myself to
take whatever the Adalonians wanted to hand me. Nothing had changed since
then. "That sofa looks comfortable." Nothing except that now I had Evelyn
Rand to look out for. "Let's sit down and talk things over."

I put my hands in my trouser pockets and strolled over to the couch I'd
indicated, giving a good imitation of nonchalance. Some coins jingled in the
right-hand pocket, in the left I felt a wallet and a latch-key in its little
leather case. Evelyn Rand was coming along beside me, her pale blue dress
whispering against the thighs of those long, free-swinging legs of hers.

We might have been any boy and gal about to spend a pleasant evening in a
New York living room. Except that there was no window in this living room,
and that not far beyond its walls a man named Francois Villon was suffering
some unimaginable fate.

No. The Twentieth Century couple we most resembled was a Jewish one in
some Berlin parlor, pretending that all was right with the world while all
the time they were aware of horror outside, and the inevitable closing in of
doom upon them. I knew this was only a brief respite, a short moment of truce
our captors were according us for some inscrutable reason of their own.

I kept my face averted from Evelyn 'til I was certain I had gained control
of it, 'til I was certain she could not read from it the dread and the
despair that were in my thoughts. If I had known then what there was to
dread, what there was to despair of, I should not have been able to conceal
those emotions from her.

"Suppose we begin," I said, when Evelyn Rand and I were
seated, "with your
story. You started out to go to church. You went around the corner— and
then?"

"And then I had a curious feeling that I was about to meet someone who'd
been waiting for me a long time." Just the tip of a tiny ear showed from
beneath the honeycolored cap of her hair. "The street was full of people with
Sunday shining in their eyes, but it wasn't any of them. It was someone else.
I'd had that same feeling, dreamlike but altogether actual, once before."

"In Faith Corbett's garden in Westchester," I murmured, "the day before
you went away to college."

"Yes." She didn't seem at all surprised that I knew. "That time I was sure
Johnny, the boy I'd pretended to play with all the lonely years 'til he'd
become very real and very dear, was about to meet me at the gate—Oh!"
She broke off. "Your name is John, isn't it? And you've got reddish brown
hair and eyes too, like my Johnny, and a cleft in your chin."

"Wait," I cut in, a cold breath blowing on the base of my skull. "Wait.
Let's not talk about me. Let's go back to Sunday."

"I was excited, though I kept telling myself I was being very silly." Her
gaze stayed on my face, and her eyes were luminous. "Halfway down the block I
stopped, because there was a strange little man in front of me, bowing to me
with old fashioned courtesy.

"'You are Evelyn Rand,' he said, in a whispery sort of far-away voice.
He'd popped up so suddenly, right there. He was so queer- looking too, bald,
with a round face and tight, yellowish skin and a head a little too large for
him."

"Achronos Astaris!" I exclaimed, under my breath.

"What? What did you say?"

"I've met your little man." And how! "But go on."

"I admitted my name. I was a bit nervous, but I wasn't afraid. Not yet.
There was something about him I didn't like, but nothing could happen to me
there in the heart of New York, with crowds all around. 'And you are ...? ' I
asked.

"'A friend of Faith Corbett's,' he told me. 'Your old nurse—I've
come from her for you.'

"'Faith's ill,' I cried. 'She's dying!'

"The little man shook his bead. 'No. Not dying. But if you'll be good
enough to come with me. It will not take long.' He put his hand on my elbow,
as if to urge me, and a strange thing happened. The buildings, the street,
everything, melted into grayness, everything but the little man's eyes. Those
eyes got larger and larger. I seemed to plunge into them. The grayness seemed
to be rushing by me at a perfectly awful speed, and it was empty, most
dreadfully empty. And then—and then—"

She stopped, her pupils widening again, the faint rose that had spread
under her skin when she'd spoken of my resemblance to her imaginary Johnny
fading to a transparent pallor.

"Steady, Evelyn," I said softly. "Steady." My hand slid along 'til it
reached hers. "Look. You don't have to go on. I can guess the rest."

"But I want to, John. I want to tell you."

I'm no Galahad. I'd held hands with girls before, and done plenty more
than hold hands. But there was something about the feel of hers, something
about the way her icy fingers took hold of mine, quite simply, quite
naturally. "Go ahead." I couldn't trust myself to say any more, just
then.

"The grayness got solid. I was standing among a lot of queer rocks. Beside
me there was something out of a nightmare, a Thing with a tremendous head,
and awful eyes, and—

"I don't know. I must have fainted. The next thing I knew I was in this
room, lying on this sofa, and the gentleman who brought you here was telling
me that I was all right, that I must not be frightened. But I was. I was
terrified, though I couldn't seem to do anything but lie here and stare at
him. Mr. Daster kept on talking, low-voiced and very soothingly. I... it's
funny, John... but I can't remember what he said. I can remember only that
little by little my heart stopped pounding, and the iron band that seemed to
be squeezing my brain was gone and I—I think I fell asleep."

They had been kinder to her than to me, I thought. Thank God for that.

"I woke up," Evelyn went on, "with the feeling that someone was in the
room. Someone was, a girlish looking little boy about nine or ten years old,
with the saddest eyes I've ever seen. He smiled shyly at me and spoke in
beautiful French, apologizing for his intrusion. I asked him who he was, and,
John, he said he was Citizen Louis Charles, cidevant Louis Bourbon,
heir to the throne of France."

"The Lost Dauphin," I exclaimed. "It checks. By all that's holy, it
checks. He was on the list too."

"What checks?" she demanded. "What list are you talking about?"

"Never mind. I'll tell you about it later." I had a pretty clear idea of
what happened next, from what I'd seen and what I'd gathered from her manner.
"When the boy said that, you were sure he was mad. Then you met the others he
spoke of and each one told you he was someone else who couldn't possibly be
alive, and you were sure that you'd lost your mind and were in an asylum with
a lot of other lunatics." I wanted to get her past that part. "Isn't that
so?"

"Yes," she breathed. "What else could I think?"

"Certainly not the truth, the utterly incredible truth." The jittery look
was in her eyes again. I'd learn the rest of what I needed to know later.
"Look here, young lady, you've been talking long enough, it's about time you
gave another fellow a chance. One thing though. You haven't been harmed, have
you, or annoyed in any way?"

"No. But the time has been so long, so awfully long. I never knew a day
and a night and half of another day could seem like eternity."

A day and a night. I checked myself. It was two weeks since she'd
vanished. "Is that how long it is since you came here?" Did time run
differently here? If it did that was proof, indubitable proof, that this was
not some hidden-away place on Earth, as I still half-hoped. "Are you
sure?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure of anything. But I've only slept once, in the
bedroom in there," she nodded at the door opposite to that to which she had
pointed before. "And I've only eaten four meals. Why do you ask?"

Here was something else that I'd have to break to her carefully. "Because
that fits in, too, to my idea of what this is all about. Listen to me,
Evelyn. We're involved in something very strange, something almost uncanny.
It's quite unbelievable, but we've got to believe it, because it's true. And
because the only way we can get out of the predicament we're in is to
understand it thoroughly. What's more, we've got to keep remembering, always,
that we can and will find a way out, no matter who or what opposes us, no
matter how impossible it seems."

I was talking for my own benefit as well as hers. I needed the confidence
I was preaching.

"I understand." Her grave, gray look was fixed on my face and I read utter
trust there. "You'll find a way out, I know you will." I didn't deserve that.
I was just a confused, bewildered guy up against something too big for him.
And I was altogether a stranger to her.

Or was I? There was that imaginary playmate of hers, who had my name, my
features. There was the way she had become a very real, very intimate person
to me long before I'd seen her, a person so real that I loved her before I
set eyes on her. "Now that we're together at last, Johnny," she said, "I'm
not afraid any longer. I'm not afraid of anything at all."

I couldn't let her down after that. Now could I? "Thanks, Eve," was all
that I said, but she got what I meant. "Now let me tell you my experience." I
let her have it, lock, stock and barrel, the essentials of everything I'd
been through from the time Astaris had shown up in the Art Gallery to when
Daster had brought us together. Of almosteverything. For no good
reason I left out mention of the carved black stone I'd found in her nursery,
the gem whose replica was so paradoxically painted into her portrait. Because
it was so nerve- shaking I omitted the incident of the ambush on the entrance
plain and the fate of the two who had attacked Kass. And I left out Villon's
cryptic speculation about the implication of the arrangement of the buildings
in Adalon for another very good reason, a reason that was sending ripples
chasing up and down my spine at the same time as it tightened my throat with
helpless anger.

We were being spied on

As we talked I had gradually become aware of this, I don't know how or
why. We were alone in that room. The doors, keyholeless, were shut. There was
no sign of a crack or peephole in the walls and nothing hung on them that
might conceal one. I had heard nothing out of the way.

Perhaps I had become sensitized, vaguely, to the waves of nervous force of
which Daster had spoken. Whatever it was, I was conscious, as distinctly as
one is conscious of a stare on the back of one's neck, that our every word,
our every thought, our every emotion, was being observed and
noted.

There was nothing I could do about it. There was no point
in alarming the
girl by telling her about it, no point in undoing what I had accomplished in
setting her at her ease. Moreover, there might be some advantage in
concealing from the Adalonians my awareness of what they were up to. And so I
went on as I had intended.

"It all adds up to something like this, Evelyn. In some quite
incomprehensible way, we have been carried off to a region that isn't on
Earth at all, that in all likelihood isn't anywhere in the Solar System.
Tentatively, at least, we've got to assume that what's been hinted to me is
true, that those who have done this, the people I've been calling the
Adalonians for lack of a better name, come from Earth too, but from an Earth
far, far older than that which we know. Whether this is so or not, they have
a knowledge and powers far greater than we can conceive.

"One of these powers seems to be that of ranging backward and forward in
time at will, for not only we, but other individuals from a number of far
separated periods in Earth's history, have been gathered here by them. How
they do this I can't even begin to think, but there is no question that they
have done it, and done it with a definite purpose. That purpose seems to be
the acquisition of some information from us, some knowledge that, omniscient
as they seem, they lack."

"If you're right about them, what could we possibly know that they
don't?"

I shook my head. "Don't ask me that. But you must remember that the
knowledge of a race is not always cumulative. Mankind forgets, just as every
man forgets. Haven't we often run across hints that the ancients had skills,
arts, of which all trace has been lost? To take a simple thing, the secret of
Michaelangelo's pigments has been lost."

"And no one knows how Stradivarius got that wonderful tone in his
violins," Evelyn put in.

"Exactly. But I have a notion that what the Adalonians, want from us is
something we don't know ourselves that we know." I was thinking of the
questions that Astaris and Kass had put to me. "And even finding out what it
is isn't quite as important as discovering why they need the information
they're after, why they are so eager to get it. I don't think it's merely
scientific curiosity, they're going to too much trouble for that."

The uneasy sense of being watched, listened to, persisted. It was a creepy
feeling, that of an unseen Presence hovering over us, of privacy invaded and
of being helpless to avoid it. A damned uncomfortable feeling.

"Why is it important, Johnny?" Evelyn asked. "How would it help us to know
all this?"

Her inquiry seemed to crystallize something that all this time had been at
the back of my mind. "Because, Eve, if we know what they want and why they
want it, we may be able to trade it for our release. We can't fight them, but
I have an idea that we can dicker with them."

I didn't say that for her. I said it for him, for whomever it was that was
listening. And I waited for some indication that he had heard, for some sign
that my offer was accepted. As if she sensed what I was about Evelyn waited
too, her damask lips a little parted, her fingers tightening on my hand,
tightening and trembling almost imperceptibly.

No hint came that I'd been heard, no slightest hint that what I'd said had
made any impression on the eavesdropper. I was a fool to have hoped it. The
Adalonians were too certain of their powers, too completely certain. They
would squeeze us dry of what they wanted from us, and then toss us away like
so much pulped orange. Toss us to the Drina.

"What is it, Johnny?" Evelyn exclaimed. "What's scared you?"

"Scared me?"

"Your face went white all of a sudden, your lips gray." Small wonder they
had, with the vision flashing across my mind, of her graceful form swallowed
within a gray-purple loathesome mass, of her lovely body blurring, melting
away...

"White?" I laughed. "No wonder I'm white. I'm so hungry I'm carnivorous
now, and in about a half an hour more I'll turn cannibalistic. If you don't
look out I'm likely to be lunching on you."

Her laugh, responding to mine, was a silvery tinkle. "I'm afraid I
wouldn't afford you much nourishment, I'm all skin and bones." She broke off.
"Remember when I said that last, Johnny? We were playing we were shipwrecked
and we were arguing which one of us should eat the other. Do you
remember?"

The queer thing was that I seemed to. Very, very dimly, as if it were
something I'd dreamed. But all kids play shipwreck sometime or other. "How
did it come out?" I asked. "Who ate whom?"

"You ate me, of course. I meant you to, all the time."

"That must have been a pretty swell meal. But all kidding aside, is there
any prospect of being fed around here?" Get a grip on yourself, chump, I was
saying to myself. Keep your eye on the ball. "Or am I doomed to slow
starvation?" Part of me was aching to take her in my arms, and never let her
go. And another part of me was telling me that was just what I must not do.
"A tenderloin about four inches thick, with the blood oozing out from under a
blanket of mushrooms and onions, would just about put the roses you seem to
miss so much back in my pallid cheeks." I sucked said cheeks in and pressed
my hands to my middle, groaning.

This clowning brought that musical laugh from her again. Which was my
intention. "It's quite likely your life may be saved," she said, "very
shortly." She glanced at her wrist, at a tiny dial, no bigger than a
fingernail, cased in crystal and clinging there by grace of a bracelet
braided from platinum strands. "It's almost noon!" She rose from the couch,
"Come on. We'll go see."

As I got to my feet, I was thinking: Almost noon! But it was almost noon
when I started for Brooklyn, and that was hours ago. "Are you sure that's the
right time, Eve?" I asked aloud. "Hasn't your watch stopped?"

"Of course not. I wound it this morning and it was going then." She was
walking toward one of the doors and I was following her.

"How many times have you wound it since you left for church," I asked
softly.

"Only that once, Johnny. Why?"

"Oh nothing. I thought anything as small as that would have to be wound
every couple of hours or so." Nothing?

It was the indisputable proof that we were somewhere else than on Earth.
Evelyn might have been deceived as to elapsed time, that faint of hers might
have been a coma lasting for days, but the little mechanism on her wrist
could not be deceived. Measured by Earth time she had started for church more
than two weeks ago, but she'd only had to wind her watch once since then, and
it had not stopped. Time ran differently here, there could be no question of
that, and the rest followed inevitably.

Evelyn opened the door and a strange polyglot of voices came through to
me. The room we entered was large, high-ceilinged. It was as windowless as
the one from which we came. But that one had been empty save for the two of
us. A dozen or so men were in here.

And such men! The one I first set my eyes on was olive-skinned, his face
angular. He wore a short-skirted robe diagonally striped in vivid coloring,
and leather sandals whose thongs were crisscrossed about his muscular legs.
His mop of black, kinky hair came down on either side of his head almost to
the jaws and it was square cut. He might have stepped down from a mural in
the Egyptian Room of the Museum.

He was conversing, more by signs than words, with a blonde giant dressed
in skins, his yellow shock bristling with strange ornaments of bone. A Briton
barbarian from long before the invasion of the Picts or I missed my guess.
Beyond them was a group whose members were a togaed Roman, an American Indian
in full panoply of quill-embellished buckskin and a fierce eyed Mongolian
jingling with hammered silver accoutrements who might well have been a
lieutenant of Genghis Khan.

To describe all the occupants of that long chamber would be to make a
catalogue of all the races of Man through five thousand years of history. It
would require an etymologist to name all the languages they spoke. In speech,
in customs, in origin, they were utterly different. But there was one thing
they had in common, one thing I felt at once, in the moment I entered among
them.

That thing was betrayed by a tautness of the cords in their necks, by a
continual shifting of their eyes to the door that from its location I knew
opened on the corridor that had brought me to Evelyn, by a jerkiness of
movement that could come only from almost unendurable tension.

One of the grizzled elevator men in the building that houses the offices
of Sturdevant, Hamlin, Mosby and Garfield was a Russian aristocrat, an ex-
Baron. He'd been captured by the Bolsheviks during the Revolution, had been
imprisoned for some years, had escaped by some fluke or other. We'd gotten
friendly, and once he'd told me of the jails of the Cheka, of the rooms in
which the prisoners were gathered, each one knowing that sooner or later he
would be called out to be executed, none knowing when, or if he would be the
next, or if he would be the last. All knowing that doom was certain, and
waiting, waiting, waiting...

They were like that, exactly like that, the men assembled here, except
that their case was worse because they did not know to what fate they were to
be summoned. They knew only that it would be something less merciful than
death.

"There's someone here I want you to meet, Johnny," Evelyn said. Her hand
on my arm, she guided me to a corner where stood two men and a boy, a little
withdrawn from the others, a little aloof.

The boy was the one she had already described to me; the Lost Dauphin, son
of Marie Antoinette and the ill-fated Louis XVI of France. His clothing was
almost in rags, his toes thrust through the broken uppers of his shoes and
there was a bruise on the side of his face. The mark of some brutal jailer's
blow, I thought, recalling that History's last certain glimpse of him was in
a prison of the Terror.

One of the men with the Dauphin was a tall and stately Teuton, square-
jawed, black polled. There was something of the military in his posture, but
the long-fingered hand with which he seemed to be fumbling for a sword hilt
was the sensitive hand of a musician, and his haggard countenance was too
eloquent of thought to be a soldier's. I was afterward to learn that this was
John Orth, Archduke of Tuscany, son of Princess Marguerite of the Two
Sicilies and closest friend of that scion of the Emperor Franz Josef of
Austria who died for love at Mayerling.

It was the last of that trio who interested me most.

He was shorter than his companion, broader of shoulder and chest. His
powerful body was swathed in a cloak of dark purple, and if the little
Dauphin's pose was kingly, this man's was imperial. His hair, his beard, were
blonde and silken, the eyes that watched me as we approached were the deepest
blue I'd ever seen and keen as the thrust of a rapier. At one instant there
was a sad sweetness about his mouth, almost effeminate, at the next it firmed
and I knew that here was a man to venerate, and to fear.

He spoke as we came up to the group. "Ali, Maid Evelyn. Thou hast deprived
us of thy sweet company too long." His voice, though low, was sonorous and it
was mellow, and something inside of me thrilled to it. "And who is this thou
bringest with thee?"

"Someone from my own time and age. John March."

I'll be damned if I didn't have the impulse to go down on one knee when he
turned to look at me. "Johnny," Evelyn said, "This is King Arthur of
Britain."

"John March," he repeated, and lifted his hand. I didn't know whether to
shake or kiss it, that's how bewildered I was. I did neither.

I did neither because in the next instant Arthur was no longer paying any
attention to me, nor I to him. Because there was another voice in that room,
a rasping, imperative voice. The voice that all its occupants were waiting
for, saying a name. Saying two names.

"John March. Evelyn Rand. You are wanted."

The lottery of doom had been drawn again, and it was our names that had
been drawn!

Evelyn stiffened, besidE me, her winsome face drained of
all color. "Us,"
she whispered. "Johnny. They have come for us."

Across the high-ceilinged chamber the strip of secret blackness between
the portal's edge and its jamb widened with a fearful slowness...

"Chin up, Eve." My arm went around the girl's slender waist and I pulled
her quivering body against my side. "Head up." My voice was steady, though
how I contrived to keep it so I still do not comprehend. "There's nothing to
be afraid of. Nothing at all." My forehead was wet with a chill sweat.

The togaed Roman backed away from the widening door, his haughty,
patrician features gray with terror. A mustached Tartar lurched against a
wing- helmeted Viking from the Fjords.

"Don't let them take me," Eve moaned. "Don't let them—"

"And that we shall not, Maid Evelyn," King Arthur's deep-chested tones cut
across her plea. "As long as there remains breath in our body and strength in
our arms." He shoved past me to interpose himself between us and the
grotesque beings who now were entering the now open doorway.

"Nor so long as I have powder and ball with which to defend you," John
Orth added and ranged himself beside Arthur, his hand fumbling out from
within his oddly cut jacket a long-barreled pistol whose butt was of silver
intricately engraved. "Never has it been said that an Archduke of Tuscany
failed to champion the cause of a maid in distress."

"Nor a Bourbon." The little Dauphin joined the three, somehow no longer a
child as he whisked a stiletto from somewhere among his rags.

And toward those three from the past there advanced across the wide space
that had cleared between them and the entrance three men of the dim future,
two Plebos and Daster in his true shape. Arthur's purple cloak fell back from
his arm and a sword flashed out, a great gleaming sword full four feet in
length, its blade a shaft of silver light, its hilt jewelled gold. "Excalibur
has not forgot its skill," he boomed, "nor its master his chivalry."

Written down all this seems mere rhodomontade, then it was rather
splendid. The bald and bulbous skulls of the trio they defied held all
knowledge—unimaginably transcending the magic of Merlin, the esoteric
powers to which Cagliostro laid claim. The ogling eyes could read our every
thought, our every intention, almost before we were ourselves aware of them.
The boneless, writhing tentacles could paralyze a man with agony, yet knowing
all this Arthur, and Orth dared to challenge them with a sword, an ancient
pistol and a stiletto.

"The hell you did!" I jabbed a forefinger at a silvery splash on the wall
directly behind the leader of the Future Men. "Your bullet went right through
him." An eerie prickle scampered my spine. Though reason told me that this
was only one more manifestation of that same mastery over the vibrations of
matter that had enabled me to pass through a solid wall, no such scientific
rationalization could make the occurrence less uncanny. "Bullets or steel are
no good against them."

Now the Adalonians were within five feet of us and as though I'd not
spoken Arthur's shaft rose, gleaming. "Halt," he roared, "an ye do not wish
to feel the bite of a blade that hath never known defeat."

It was magnificent; and it was as pathetically ludicrous as Don Quixote's
tilt with a windmill, as Canute bidding the tide retreat. It was worse than
ridiculous, it was killing what faint hope I had of saving Evelyn from—
"Daster!" Abruptly I was quite calm, my mind crystal clear. "Listen to
me."

The Doctil's ear membranes pulsed and the three paused. I sensed Daster's
question. "What is it, John March, that you wish to say?"

I pulled in a wheezing breath. Arthur and Orth were warriors and their
weapons were futile against these strange beings who were our captors. I was
a lawyer. My weapons were those of the weak against the strong; temporizing,
compromise, stratagem.

"These men will fight you 'til you destroy them. You don't want to do
that. You want them alive or you would not have brought them here in the
first place."

"Exactly," the Doctil responded. "But they are of no use to us as they
are. They must be taught to submit to our will."

"Taught? How? Read them, Daster, as I know you can. Read them and ask
yourself if there is anything you can do, with all your powers, that will
break their indomitable spirit."

His tremendous eyes moved to Arthur and Orth, and to the frail, boyish
Dauphin. For what seemed an endless time the room was breathless.

Then: "No," the Adalonian sighed. "Even if we reduce them to their
ultimate atoms they still will defy us." His thought flicked to the Plebos.
He was giving them an order, "Feed them to the drina—"

"Wait!" I cut in. "Wait, Daster. I can tell you how you may bend them to
your purpose. Will you listen to me?"

"Hold!" he told the Plebos. Then to me, "What do you propose?"

"What you cannot accomplish by force, you may by reason. Be frank with us.
Tell us what you want of us and why, then offer us in exchange our release,
our return to our own place and time, unharmed, and we will do our best to
give you what you want. You have nothing to lose. You have to gain that for
which you have gone to the trouble of gathering us here."

I sensed interest in the Doctil, then indecision. "If the rest of the
Kintat agree—" He sank into the same sort of listening trance that had
enveloped Kass on the brink of the plateau overhanging Adalon and I knew that
he was in communication with his fellow Doctils, was transmitting my
proposition to them.

"By the Holy Rood!" King Arthur growled, his countenance darkening. "We
mislike this traffic with sorcerers. Merlin hath placed an enchantment upon
Excalibur that rendereth it puissant against all evil witcheries, and we
fainer would—"

"You damn fool," I blurted. "They could wipe you out in the twinkling of
an eye, and you want to fight them. You're a blathering infant—"

"Silence, knave!" he thundered. "Thou art insolent." His eyes flashed blue
lightnings and his sword rose in a swift, shining arc. "For less have we
slain an hundred caitiffs." The blade swept down, straight for my skull
swerved in the last instant to avoid Evelyn, who had leaped in front of me,
her arms outspread.

"Arthur Pendragon!" she cried, stamping her foot. "Aren't you ashamed of
yourself? Johnny's just saved your life and you try to kill him. You—
you ungrateful—"

He glared at her, his great brows beetling. "This," he growled, "is not to
be borne. We—" Abruptly his face was lit by a twinkling smile. "Nay. We
cannot be wroth with thee, fair maid, who hath made endurable these dreary
hours of our imprisonment. For thy sake we shall be merciful. Let this bold
varlet crave our pardon on bended knee and it will be accorded."

"I'll be blasted if I will," I burst out, hotly. "I'm free, white and
Amer—"

A soft palm across my lips cut me off. "Johnny," Eve whispered, her eyes
pleading. "Do what he wants. Can't you see he's nothing but a big baby and
has to be humored."

There was, indeed, something of the overgrown kid dressed up for 'let's
pretend' about his purple trappings, something endearingly childish about the
petulant scowl that had replaced his brief smile.

"Oh well," I shrugged, and dropped to one knee. "I'm sorry I called you a
fool, King Arthur," I muttered as graciously as I could manage.

"We grant thee our forgiveness." He held the back of his free hand to my
lips. I might as well, I decided, make a complete ass of myself, so I kissed
it and was rewarded by a grin from the hulking king and the tingling touch of
Evelyn's fingertips on my cheek. "All the same," I grunted, scrambling to my
feet, "you better cut out any idea of scrapping with these people if you ever
want to see Camelot again."

"Camelot," Arthur sighed. "We misdoubt that we desire very greatly to
return there. All our brave company that used aforetime to gather about the
Table Round is scattered and the gray winds howl over our desolate land. The
banners of our gentil and parfait knights are mired by
fraternal strife, their shields besmirched with the breaking of their vows of
fealty and fast friendship. All have abandoned us, all the noble chivalry who
served God and us. Only Bedivere is left us, Sir Bedivere the Faithful."

That massively moulded countenance of his darkened and his lips twitched
with pain. "But yestere'en, sore wounded in the Last Great Battle in the
West, we gave Bedivere our blade Excalibur to cast back into the lake whence
it came, and—" he broke off, staring at the storied sword he had named.
"But we still have it! Now how-?"

"The legends say that a hand appeared out of the Lake and caught Excalibur
from Bedivere, King Arthur." A thrill ran through me as I recalled the
ancient tale. "And the legends say also that you did not die, which is the
truth as we can see. But the story of your passing that has come down to us
tells that three Queens bore you away from that misted battlefield on a
black- swathed barge, and that I know to be false. Wasn't it in a whorl of
dust that you vanished?"

"A whispering whorl of dust!" His deep blue eyes fastened on my face, and
in them was a starry wonder, and a growing awe. "Aye. Out of the drab fog it
came, out of the dun veil that shrouded the moans of the wounded, the throat-
rattles of the dying. Out of the battle in which none were victorious it
stole, and made us part of it. Now indeed this is such a matter of
clairvoyance as is worthy of Merlin himself. How know you this, John
March?"

"I know it, and I know many things that are beyond your understanding,
Arthur Pendragon," I pressed my sudden advantage. "Which ought to convince
you that you'd better take my advice, as you used to take Merlin's. You may
be a grand fighter, but when it comes to using your brain—"

"Johnny!" Eve broke in. "Daster's coming out of his trance."

The Doctil's great orbs were focussed on me again. He was about to give me
the Kintat's answer to my proposition and I seemed to empty out, inside; was
a cold, shivering shell.

"You will come with me," I heard. "John March and Evelyn Rand." My heart
sank. "And you also, Louis Capet, John Orth, and Arthur Pendragon."

Evelyn stayed close to me as, led by Daster and shepherded
by the two
Plebos, we emerged from the strange, windowless House of Earth. A tightening
of her fingers on my hand, a sharp inhalation, reminded me that this was her
first sight of Adalon.

"The city's built on a rather interesting plan," I remarked, in an easy,
conversational tone, "if you notice." I wanted to get her thoughts off what
lay ahead of us. She was trying hard to be brave, but her face was dreadfully
white and her little chin was quivering. "Look at that enormous building in
the center, these eight others scattered around." For some reason Daster was
not using rados for us. We were walking across the plaza towards the domed,
enormous House of Sun.

"Scattered is right, Johnny." Eve smiled wanly. "I can't see what you mean
by a plan."

"You can't? Look..." I pointed out how the pattern of the city was that of
the Solar System. The others listened as attentively as Eve, though to Arthur
what I was saying must have seemed the sheerest doubletalk. "I don't even
think that it is by coincidence that our prison is the building corresponding
to Earth. I think—"

"Pardonnez, Monsieur Marsh," the Dauphin interrupted. "Ditez
moi, s'il vous plait, qu'est ce que c'est qui mont, la bas?" The thin-
bodied lad's face was alive with a boyish, eager interest as he asked me what
it was that lifted from the ground beyond the House of Mercury.

It was a lacy erection of crisscrossed, metallic beams, a spindling tower
some five hundred feet high. "Jove!" I exclaimed. "They work fast, these
Adalonians. There wasn't a sign of that when I passed here before, and that
can't be more than an hour ago."

I discerned what he referred to. At the top of the tower, and at its base,
what I had taken at first glance to be excrescences from its netted surface
were machines, their gears turning, their piston arms shuttling
frenetically.

I saw now that from the distant House of Pluto, clear across the plaza, a
conveyor belt brought a stream of silvery girders to the machine on the
ground. It seized them, swallowed them, disgorged them to another endless
belt, changed in shape and studded with what from here looked very much like
rivets.

Now the girders were carried almost vertically up to the machine at the
tower's summit and the tower visibly grew upward as the machine moved upward
with it, building it.

"Where are the workmen?" Eve demanded. "Those machines can't be simply
working all by themselves."

"Oh," I replied airly. "An Adalonian somewhere out of sight is directing
them by remote control."

"No," Daster corrected me. "They were set for their task by a stencilled
pattern inserted into them. They will need no further supervision until the
tower is finished."

"Of course," I made a quick recovery. "Just like our own jacquard looms
for weaving intricately designed rugs and laces—"

That was lost on Louis. "How high will it be?" he asked the Doctil in that
beautiful French of his. "When it is finished?"

"Its apex will be level with the lip of the encircling precipice."

"Whew!" I whistled. "That's a mile—five times the height of the
Empire State—"

"What is its purpose," Orth inquired. "And why is it being built in such
haste?"

Daster didn't answer him, not intelligibly, but the Austrian paled, his
black eyes flashing, his hand straying to the sword-hilt that was not at his
waist. "Easy, mister," I said softly, realizing that he had been rebuffed in
no uncertain manner and in his resentment was on the point of an overt act
that might undo all I had accomplished. "Easy. They've got a right to their
secrets."

Nevertheless, the incident held a meaning I would have given a lot to
fathom.

I glanced around the expanse we were crossing, wondering if there were any
other significant changes I had failed to notice. It seemed to me that there
were fewer Plebos than before. Those I did see, darting about on their rados,
paid not the slightest attention to us but none failed to manifest a keen
interest in the swiftly mounting tower. I had the impression that this
interest was underlaid by some pressing anxiety.

Eve got it too. "There's worry in the air here," she whispered. "Fear
almost. That thing's being built to protect them against something, and they
won't feel safe until it's finished." As if to confirm her one of the Plebos
accompanying us glanced upward. I caught the beginning of a quick
thought-flash between him and Daster, curtained from me at once.

Up there at the brink of the cliff, a gray-purple shadow was flattened
against the shimmering Veil of Ishlak. I saw it only momentarily, and then it
had oozed away in a fashion that told me it was a drina.

Had it been spying on us? I wasn't sure whether that was my own
speculation or whether I was intercepting some communication among the Future
Men, but somehow I fancied a vast horde of the formless creatures bursting
through the Veil, flowing down the immense, rocky ramparts, filling the bowl
and swallowing every living being within it. So vivid was the illusion that
my nerves drew taut.

"By our halidom!" King Arthur exclaimed. "So bright a bird we have never
seen!"

It wasn't a bird that leaped from the Sun Dome. It was a stratcar that
zoomed with blurring speed straight for the spot where the drina had peered
down at us, hovered there for a split second and dived through the Veil. Once
more, in that swift leap, I sensed alarm. The feeling of apprehension in the
air of Adalon seemed to deepen.

Villon's voice came back to me, musing when Kass was ordered back to the
wild and rocky tableland out of which he'd just conducted us, "Something is
not as it should be among them. Dare we hope...? "

I must blot that line of thought before Daster tuned in on it. Poor
Francois! He was himself undoubtedly beyond hope by this time. His audacity,
that a dozen times had saved him from hanging, would be futile against the
Future Men. His luck had run out. Decidedly it had run out when Gohret took
him —

"Look out, Johnny!" Eve's tug pulled me to a stop. "You almost walked into
the wall."

Daster and the Plebos shooed us now into the corridor in the House of Sun
out of which I had emerged not so long ago. Or was it the same? The passage
we entered went straight into the depths of the structure. Nowhere was there
any sign of the spiral ramp by which I had descended from the stratcar
hangar. The doorway through which we had entered was the same. It must be the
same; there had been only that single opening on this side of the great
building...

But here, within, was a hall different in direction, in contour. A little
while ago, in the House of Earth, a door had appeared in a blank wall beside
me where an instant before there had been no door. In that same instant the
great- headed, tentacular Daster had become a near-sighted, professorial
human...

This impermanency of things apparently substantial was the most
disquieting of all the phenomena of Adalon. Villon first, then Arthur and
Orth and the Dauphin, had proved so altogether human that I had grown to
accept, not through logic alone but with an inner conviction, the fact that
our company had been assembled out of fifteen disparate centuries. Once
oriented to such a telescoping of Time, I could also comprehend that Daster
and the other Adalonians were beings out of a remote Future.

But that flesh and bone, that solid stone, should be subject to
unpredictable flux in shape and appearance still seemed incomprehensible.

It was, I had come to realize, this very flavor of unreality, menacing
though it might be, that had enabled me to carry on. One may know utter,
stifling terror in a nightmare, but in a nightmare one never quite despairs.
One keeps on fleeing the inescapable succubus, one keeps on battling the
unconquerable apparitions, because in the depths of one's being one somehow
is still aware that awakening will come in the end.

I knew that this was no dream. I knew that the ghastly dilemma with which
I was confronted would not be solved by a merciful awakening. And yet,
because so much that had happened had the quality of a nightmare, I did not
quite despair.

We were, with no gradation, with no warning of any kind, far within a
chamber so vast that it dwarfed us to inconsiderable midges. Its walls were
so immensely distant that they were misty limits to our sight, its ceiling so
far above that it was a cloudy, indefinable dome. Only the floor beneath was
definite, and this was a level expanse black as space itself. A gleaming,
polished black it was, so that it seemed to have no substance and we appeared
to be suspended in a featureless void, balanced sole to sole on our own
inverted images.

In this gargantuan cavern there were only the five of us. Daster and the
Plebos had vanished!

As a vaulted Gothic Cathedral is imbued with the very essence of the God
to whose worship it has been erected, so was this unimaginable nave with some
awesome Presence. It laid upon us, upon our hushed and crouching souls, a
dark shadow of awed anticipation that had some fraternity with fear but
transcended fear. It silenced us. It held us motionless. It held us peering
wordlessly into the endless, empty reaches—

It seemed at first a speck moving jerkily across that
gleaming black
expanse. There was no point of reference against which to measure the speed
of its approach but it did approach, because very gradually it grew
larger.

I heard King Arthur's sword slide from its scabbard. I heard the click of
John Orth's pistol as he cocked it. I didn't bother to remind them how futile
their weapons were. My own muscles were tautening across the back of my
shoulders and in my thighs. For seconds I held my breath. Evelyn's hushed
voice was in my ears. "They're men, Johnny. They're two men like us, not like
the Adalonians."

Her eyesight must have been far keener than mine, because it wasn't 'til
several heartbeats after that, that I made out the tiny forms. There was
infinite weariness about the way they approached, a desperate fatigue that
carried somehow across the distance between us. Once one of them fell, and it
took a long time for the other to lift him to his feet.

And then, quite suddenly, they were near enough for us to see who they
were.

"Villon!" the Dauphin exclaimed. "Et le Prophete Elijah!" He
broke away from us, was scampering toward them, excited and eager as a ten-
year-old boy might be expected to be and as reckless in his excitement of any
precaution.

In the next instant the rest of us were streaming after him, our feet
curiously making no sound on that marble-hard floor.

With a strange swiftness we had reached the two, were crowding around
them. I had eyes for Villon alone. He held himself erect, but I could see
that it was with tremendous effort that he did so. He was clothed as he had
been when I had last seen him, and there was no wound visible about him, but
all his jauntiness was gone and he was drained, somehow, of his infrangible
spirit, emptied of all his indomitable courage.

"Francois!" I groaned. "What have they done to you? What have they done to
you, man?"

He looked at me out of eyes that were like soot marks thumbed into hollow
sockets. A shadow of his old mocking smile crossed his scarred lips.

"What have they done to me, my old?" A long shudder ran through him. "I
know not. I know only that though they laid not a hand on me they have torn
from my breast matters I kept secret from God Himself. I know only that I
have babbled to them every thought I have had since I lay in the warm womb of
my mother, though not a single word crossed my lips. I know only that they
did not learn what they wished, and that I was about to be cast to the drina
when some message came to them and I found myself here instead, this
venerable Jew leading me across midnight's floor."

"But you must have seen something, heard something."

"Light only, John March. A blaze of white light about me and within me,
and eyes in the light, the terrible eyes of our captors. Light that possessed
me utterly. Eyes that read my very soul. And I read theirs too and—" He
pulled the back of his hand across his seamed brow. In his eyes there was
such horror as I hope never to see again in the eyes of any man.

"And what, Francois?" It was inflicting torture on him to ask, but I had
to know.

He stared at me. "What?" His long-fingered hands went out from his sides,
palms toward me, in a baffled gesture. "Why—I have forgotten, John."
Dismay in his sultry look. "I remember that it was very terrible, but what it
was, I have forgotten."

"Don't lie to me, Francois," I choked through the tightness in my throat.
"The lives of all of us depend on what you've learned."

"More, far more than the lives of us seven is in balance," the poet
answered, his countenance that of one who has died and been reborn with the
memory of Hell searing him. "That much I know and the knowledge is a cloud of
terror that invests me. But I swear to you, by the Crown of Thorns that was
pressed on His brow, more I cannot remember and meseems that is because it is
too terrible to recall."

"May Jehovah scourge them with the whips of His lightnings." The
interruption was in sonorous Hebrew. "May He crush them with the bolts of His
thunders." I understood it though I had not 'til that moment ever heard the
ancient tongue spoken. "May He smite the sight from their eyes and the light
of reason from their brains. May the plagues He sent upon the Egyptians rot
them and their sons and their sons' sons unto the twentieth generation."

Intoning this curse, Elijah stood straight and tall and vibrant with an
awful majesty. His gnarled hands were lifted high above the silver mane of
his unkempt hair; his silver browed eyes were pits filled with a black and
blazing fire and the nostrils of his craggy nose were pinched and
quivering.

"May oblivion swallow them," he thundered, "and their names be a stink and
an abomination even unto the end of Eternity. Hear me, Adonai, my
God—"

"Your God," Francois broke in, "old man, your God, Who is ours also, has
forsaken us. Here are only we seven and none else, and if we are to be saved
it is we alone who can save ourselves."

Did I say that his courage had been drained out of him? I was
mistaken.

"But how?" Evelyn's voice was thin with the new terror that their
appearance had brought to her, to all of us. "How can we save ourselves,
Francois?" Her hands were thrown out to him, appealingly, and they were
trembling.

Villon turned lithely to her. He swept to his breast his wide- brimmed,
cone-crowned hat, its bedraggled feather fluttering. "Nay, Evelyn of the
honeyed hair, I must indeed be bemused that I have not yet observed your
presence. I know now that we have naught to fear, for not even Lucifer could
be so evil as to harm one so fair."

I didn't like that. I didn't like the bold admiration that had come into
his look in spite of what he'd just passed through, in spite of the threat
hovering over us. I didn't like, as far as that went, the way Eve had turned
to him for help, nor the tender smile that brushed her white lips.

"Please," she murmured. "Please, Francois, answer me. How are we to save
ourselves?"

He shrugged bony shoulders. "That, sweet maiden, is not for me. You have
at your service a prophet of Israel, a king and a princeling, a duke and a
barrister at the law. Apt these are in the art of arms and in the more subtle
skills of tongue and brain, and surely so brave a company can devise ways to
defeat our enemies. To myself, rhymster that I am, is left the more difficult
task of essaying to enshrine your beauty and glamour in a ballade of gray
eyes. Hmmmm." He laid a finger against the side of his rascally nose. "Let me
see. Let me see..." He winked at me with the eye that was thus hidden from
Evelyn!

That wink said, as clearly as though he had spoken, "Don't worry, my
friend. I'm putting on this act just to calm her down. She's going to pieces
and the only thing that will hold her together is a bit of skilled love-
making."

"You might leave that to me," I thought, but I grinned at the Gallic
effrontery, my heart warming again to the fellow. And then the grin was wiped
from my face and my eyes were widening. The wall from whose direction
Francois and I had come had swirled forward 'til it loomed starkly over us,
black and shining as the floor, but, because it rose to unguessable heights,
indescribably menacing. High up, a long, arc-roofed niche opened in it, a
niche filled with a golden, luminous vapor.

For an instant of awestruck silence this aureate cloud billowed in upon
itself, vibrant somehow and somehow alive. Somehow the very essence of life.
Then, as we stared at it gaping-mouthed, it seemed to become more solid, to
coalesce and divide and take on definition. Abruptly there was no longer a
mist in that recess, but in a golden light that etched it sharply against its
Styglan background, five figures gazed down at us.

Whether by some trick of perspective or in actuality, they seemed gigantic
apparitions high in some ebony sky, godlike rather than mortal. But they had
the bulbous bodies, the tentacles, the enormous heads, enormous-eyed, of the
Future Men.

I recognized Daster at one end of their rank and Gohret at the other and
so I knew the five to be the Kintat of Adalon. Some ineluctable, psychic
effluvium emanated from them, invisible yet all but palpable, and there was
nothing grotesque about those misshapen bodies, those tremendous
occiputs.

It was we who were grotesque; we with our tiny brain pans, our clumsy
hands, our groping, purblind eyes, dependent on inept physical senses for our
small acquaintance with the world about us. We were only by courtesy human.
They were truly human, and more than human. They had progressed immeasurably
farther beyond us than we had beyond our furred and hand-footed simian
ancestors who not so long ago roamed chattering in the jungle treetops. Our
only right to existence was that we might be of service to them, and to be of
service to them was high privilege.

I might actually have gone to my knees in genuflection had not Evelyn's
cold fingers, just then, crept into the palm of my hand.

One does not easily strip oneself of pride in the presence of one's
beloved. That silent appeal of Eve's restored my manhood. I straightened, the
awed humility that had invested me sloughing off. Gohret's head-membranes
pulsed once, at that, and I knew that by grace of that which lay between
Evelyn Rand and myself I had won the first skirmish of a duel just
beginning.

They were my opponents, that they were my masters was yet to be proved. As
though we were about to appear against one another in the forum of some
court, I weighed their qualities. Gohret was ruthless, coldly cruel,
implacable. Daster, at the other extremity of the line, had a modicum of
kindliness, a trace of benevolence that had impelled him to assume a shape
that would not frighten Evelyn, and to answer my wanderings about the
miracles of Adalon.

The Doctil next to Daster—Oddly, there was something familiar about
him. Not in appearance, though there were the indefinable differences about
him that made the Adalonians individuals. It was rather a matter of
imponderables—I knew who he was. Astaris! The 'little man' who had
appeared to me in the Madison Avenue Art Gallery that was worlds, and eons,
distant from here. The emissary who had plucked me, and Evelyn, out of our
own time and space.

He was the only one of the Five whose brooding gaze was other than general
and unfocussed. He had singled out Eve for his attention, and there was a
peculiar quiver about his tiny mouth—

"John March!"

The same demanding summons that had sounded in the House of Earth; it was
the voice, not of any one of the Kintat, but of all five. It pulled me out in
front of our little group. Eve clung to my hand and came with me, but I was
scarcely aware of it.

"Yes?" My own voice was a hoarse croak.

"You have offered to yield to us that which we require of you, in return
for your safe release. You have prevailed upon Arthur Pendragon, John Orth,
Louis Capet and Evelyn Rand to accede to the treaty. We require that Elijah
of Israel and Francois Villon signify their assent to it before we
procede."

"Now indeed they are most gracious," I heard Villon mutter, behind me.
"Can it be that they have found prophet and poet more obdurate than they
deemed possible?"

I was reminded of the horror in his eyes, the horror of something he had
learned but could not recall. Were the Adalonians tricking us into some
promise we might have reason to regret?

"One moment, Doctils," I objected. "My words, as I remember, were 'Tell us
what you want of us, and why. Offer us then our return to our own place and
time, unharmed, and we will do our best to give you what you want.' That was
my proposition, that was the proposition to which my friends agreed, and it
is the one on which we stand."

"A Daniel," Elijah's murmur approved. "A very Daniel." But it was not so
much this as another pulse at the sides of Gohret's head, a throb of his
membrane that once more seemed to betray disappointment, that made me glad
I'd said it. I was certain now that we had something with which to trade,
something that they had gone to great lengths in their effort to obtain, and
would go to greater. I would insist on knowing what it was before I would
commit my clients to any irretrievable contract.

"We must know," I repeated, my tone firmer with the greater assurance this
intuition gave me, "what you want of us, and why."

"What we want of you?" It was like a vast sigh filling all that enormous
vault. Then there were no more words in my brain, but only an indescribable
something beating upon it, swamping it—

Who was I to demand anything of those beings so superior to me? They were
all wise, all-powerful. I was presumptions. I must withdraw—Fingers
were tightening on my hand. Eve's fingers. Against my shoulder, on the other
side, was the pressure of a comradely shoulder—Villon's. Behind me
there was a rustle of moving feet, Arthur, Elijah, Orth and the Dauphin were
crowding close.

"Precisely," a voice that was mine, yet somehow unwilled by me, sounded in
my ears. It was not only my voice but the voice of us seven, of all of us.
"Before we can proceed we must know what you want of us," I said firmly,
abject no longer, nor fearful.

Silence received that demand, a throbbing silence behind whose veil I
sensed that there was communication among the five who loomed high above us
in that aureate niche. And then the voice of the Kintat was replying.

"Of you, Elijah," I sensed it to say, "we want the secret of Faith. We
want to know what it was that sustained your kith through centuries of
oppression, what it was that moved a certain Man of your people to pay with
His agony for the sins of generations yet unborn."

"Of you, Francois Villon, we want the secret of Beauty. We want to know
how, with words laid together in a certain order, with sound vibrations
combined in certain simple relations, with color and with shape, some among
our ancestors could recreate in men born long after they had died their own
ecstasy, an ecstasy whose very nature we do not understand.

"Of you, Arthur Pendragon, we want the secret of Obligation. We want to
know why you inspired a devotion in those you ruled that transcended all
selfish motives. We want to know why, having the power over your people that
this devotion gave you, you yet used that power for their welfare and their
happiness rather than for your own ends.

"Of you, John Orth, we want the secret of Loyalty. We want to know why,
when your prince and friend had slain himself at Mayerling and in no manner
could reproach you, you yet gave up all the honors and the luxuries that were
yours to carry to some undivulged destination a casket with which he
entrusted you, for some purpose you never learned. Because of that something
you called loyalty you became a wanderer on the face of the earth. What is
there in you that made it impossible for you to do otherwise?"

As I have said, the voice we heard was the voice of all the Kintat, yet,
in some way that I did not quite understand, each of the divisions of this
long speech seemed to be the contribution of a different Doctil. It had been
the one in the center, I later learned he was called Bolar, who had spoken of
Faith, Daster of Beauty, Gohret of Obligation. Favril, between Gohret and
Bolar, had been the one to question Orth concerning Loyalty. Now it was the
turn of Astaris, and his demand was very simply put.

"Of you, John March and Evelyn Rand, we want the secret of Love."

I heard Eve gasp at that, and felt her press even closer to me than she
had been. My arm already was about her, so that I did not know whether it was
she or I who had brought that about, but beside us there was a soft chuckle
that could come only from Villon.

It would amuse a Frenchman, that!

In the next instant my attention was back to the voice, and now it was
once more that of the whole Kintat. "We have attained all knowledge. There is
not one smallest Law of the Universe which we have not mastered. We know the
rules that govern the interaction of Galaxy with Nebula, of proton with
neutron and the interplay of all the vast range of entities between. We know
the Laws that bind all into one organic whole. Nothing in Nature has any
mystery for us, and we have learned that everything in Nature exists and is
governed by rigid, immutable laws. We know all—"

"You know not the Eternal, O Benighted!" Elijah's resonant tones flung at
them. "You know not God, and without you know Him, you know nothing."

"Precisely, prophet. The laws which govern these five things we do not yet
know: Faith, Beauty, Obligation, Loyalty and Love. But their nature also we
can learn, in the same manner that we have learned all else, by studying
those entities which manifest them. We have found them neither in the stars
nor in the ultimate atom, but in you we find them and you shall give us their
key."

"When," I responded quietly, "and only when we know why you are so
anxious to find out about them."

"But that speaks of itself, Monsieur Marsh," the Dauphin's boyish tones
broke in. "Is it not that the more understanding a savant acquires, the
greater is his thirst to learn more? These creatures here have of knowledge
all but these small fragments and it is their nature to not rest 'til they
have fitted the final bits into their picture. There," proudly, "I have
solved for you the problem."

I groaned. With one impetuous splutter of his tongue the youngster had
stultified everything I had been trying to accomplish. He had supplied the
Kintat with a good, a sufficient reason for their demands—

"Bless you," I said huskily. And then, "Is that true, Doctils of the
Kintat? Is it merely the desire to fill out the last gaps in your view of the
Universe that inspires you?"

The response was long in coming. But it came at last, reluctant. "No, John
March. We have a definite need for understanding of Faith, Beauty,
Obligation, Loyalty and Love."

"What is it? What need have you of these secrets?"

Once more that sense of reluctance, of inaudible consultation among them.
Once more the exultant awareness that I had won my point.

"We shall answer you. But it would take too long to set the answer forth
in words. Therefore you shall learn it without words."

At that the golden light in the lofty niche above us faded and utter
blackness possessed the wall. Possessed not only the wall but that whole vast
space and us, a blackness that thumbed my eyes and lay thick against my skin
and choked me, so absolute it was.

It was a blackness of non-being. And yet within it there was a stir as of
infinitely vast masses moving, and the rush of great winds, and the rumbling
thunders of many waters.

A fleck of light flowered in the heart of utter
lightlessness. Then the
light was the Sun, and about the shining orb danced midge- like the spheres
of its planets, and the backdrop for them was the whole vast, gold-speckled
panoply of the heavens.

Now you must remember that we had no scale of distance or direction by
which to measure the tremendous drama now beginning. To say we viewed it is
really incorrect. Experienced is more nearly the proper term, though
this too does not quite convey the manner by which it became part of our
consciousness.

Perhaps it progressed on a screen before us. Perhaps it moved wholly
within our brains, as a dream does. Perhaps within the plasma of our
component cells ancestral memories were awakened, and pre- memories (I know
no better word) of events yet to be; events implicit in each cell of ours as
they were implicit in the microscopic protoplasm that first blindly stirred
with life within the primal deep. However it was, we seemed to be of that
which passed in the same manner that humanity itself was of it, not as
individuals but as the race itself.

This is as clear an explanation as I can make. It is as clear as it was to
me and the others when the final terrible realization burst upon us, and once
more we were ourselves. Only the dreadful thing we had learned was clear
then, not how we had learned it.

At any rate, there was the Sun, and there its wheeling planets, and we
looked upon them as a god might. The next instant a sea, warm and gray and
limitless, heaved sluggishly on a green-scummed shore and out upon that shore
we crawled, a fish that somehow had gained the ability to breathe.

Hot was the sun, and steamy the air with vapors, and the great, fronded
ferns everlastingly dripped moisture on the oozy slime they feathered. So
like our own native brine was that climate that we flourished and
multiplied.

The land heaved as the sea had heaved. Red-glowing rock split its covering
of lush black mud, here to be cooled by the hot air that was frigid to its
own infernal temperature, there to flow, moving landscapes of molten fire,
into the hissing waters. Many of us perished, but some survived when at last
the land froze in the shape it was to hold for aeons.

Legless, scaled creatures we were then, but within us there were mute,
inchoate strivings. These gave us blurred sight, and a sort of hearing, and
the power to make small, peeping sounds. Some of us thrust out limbs, and
some of us learned to carry our progeny within our bodies 'til they were
miniature replicas of ourselves and more fitted to survive in the inimical
world.

Now it was cold that threatened our existence, great moving mountains of
solid cold that crept indomitably down upon us, pinching us between their
groaning walls of death, so that only in a narrow zone was life possible, and
there only in a sluggish and dormant way. The ice retreated, and those of us
who were left reawakened and the changes to our forms resumed, adapting us to
the changes in our habitat. We were furred now, and toothed. Some of us rose
erect, and the shapes of our forelimbs changed so that we could swing
chattering from limb to limb in the tops of the trees that now cloaked the
earth.

We learned that with sticks we could lengthen our reach to secure things
that otherwise we might not. We learned that when the over- arching foliage
failed to shield us from the rains we could find shelter in the caves. We
learned that we could soften the rocky floors of the caves and fashion many
needed things out of the reeds and out of the mud of the swamps.

In the swamps were monstrous beasts that stalked us for food as we stalked
other beasts smaller than ourselves. When we saw the fearful creatures
looming upon us, terror wrenched sounds from us and these sounds were always
the same. When we heard them we knew they meant danger, and we would flee.
After a while we would make these sounds intentionally as warning to others
of our kind, even when we who made them were safe.

This worked so well that we set other meanings to other sounds, and no
longer had we to rely on gestures alone to convey our groping thoughts.

Because of our own hunting, and because of the hunting of the greater
beasts, the small creatures upon which we lived grew sparse. It became a
question of which would survive, the giant beasts or us; and since we were so
puny we seemed to be doomed. But it dawned on us that though singly we were
helpless against them, if we fought against them in hordes we were often
triumphant.

To help us in our fight against the giant beasts we devised nets of the
vines that everywhere grew luxuriant, and shaped stones and fastened them to
the ends of sticks that they might the more dexterously be handled. Yet were
we still inept and clumsy in our common endeavours, interfering with one
another, 'til we ceded to one of us, the strongest first, afterwards the
wisest, command over us in our raids.

Hunting together we came to dwell together, and it was natural to obey the
chief huntsman in all things. Because he was the greatest among us, his was
the right to first choice of meat, and the dryest cave, and the most
desirable among our females.

Sometimes one among us disputed the right of another to be chief, and the
horde would divide, some cleaving to the one, some to the other. Then would
we tear and rend one another with fang and with claw, and with our axes and
knives of sharpened flint, 'til only one of the parties remained, and the
dispute was thus settled.

Sometimes there would be poor hunting in the land where we dwelt and it
would be decided to find some other land. Sometimes that other land would be
inhabited by some other clan who did not wish to give it up, and so it was
necessary to fight with them 'til they were slain or enslaved. If our own
land was most desirable it was natural that some other tribe should covet it
and attempt to wrest it from us. Thus we learned that any men who were
different in appearance from us, or whose speech-sounds were not the same as
ours, were by these very signs our enemies, to be destroyed if we were in
greater force than they, to be fled from if they were the more numerous or
the more subtle.

There were these enemies to fear, and there were the beasts to fear, the
sabre-toothed tiger, the great snakes of the jungle. But there were things in
the world more greatly to be feared than these. There was the great maw that
nightly swallowed the sun and that some morning might not disgorge it. There
was the recurring winter-death of the world from which we were never sure it
would awaken. There were invisible beings who rumbled monstrously in the
skies and hurled jagged spears of blue fire down upon us. There were the
unseen wraiths of the dark who made men's limbs like water, and heated their
blood 'til it was liquid flame in their veins, and stole away their
minds.

Luckily there were among us some who could hold converse with these dread
beings, and who could placate them. More powerful than the chiefs became the
medicine men, for they could call upon the unseen to destroy the chiefs, and
the chiefs feared them.

We learned many things. We learned how to make fire, and how to use it to
warm us, and to make more palatable our foods, and to melt certain stones so
that they became at once malleable and harder so that from them we could
fashion for ourselves better weapons and tools and vessels for cooking and
storage. We learned how to go upon the waters, and to journey far from sight
of the land, and we found other lands and other peoples to conquer. Our
tribes became nations; our chiefly, kings; our medicine men, priests.

Our ways changed, but one way did not change. If men differed from us in
language or appearance, they were our enemies and it was our right to take
from them that which they possessed and we desired, though we had to destroy
or enslave them.

Our knowledge and our skills grew. We changed the face of the earth to
suit our desires. We harnessed the lightning to our purpose and laced the
continents with roads of stone and of steel. We builded ourselves magnificent
cities. We conquered the air and projected our sight and our thought into the
farthermost reaches of the heavens. We shifted the atoms at will, making new
and ever new compounds.

We bickered and fought among ourselves as we had when we wore skins for
clothing and prowled the lush jungle. The wealth we had created we destroyed
with a passion and a savagery transcending that of the jungle-men we once
were, as the weapons we now used transcended our ancient flint-axes.

Where once a war might involve two tribes or two nations and few hundred
square miles of territory, wars now raged over a continent, a hemisphere,
over all the globe. Where once only the men of a nation battled in set lines
behind which there were hunger and distress but at least no peril to limb and
life, now crashing bombs and deadly gases rained out of the sky and our women
and children, our aged and crippled were engulfed in the holocaust.

As war after war spawned new and more terrible instruments of mass murder,
in the intervals between wars we would attempt the formation of some world
organization that would put an end to war. Each such league would be born
with the same high hopes, each would be born with the same cancer; the
reluctance of every nation to yield what was called its 'sovereignty.'
Sometimes indeed, so dreadful were the weapons that the last war had evolved,
it appeared that rather than bring upon the world the universal destruction
they promised, the nations would yield as much as was required of this
'sovereignty.' But always in the end the scientists of one nation or another
would devise a defence, or what they thought was a defence, against the
latest avatar of death or perhaps would secretly invent a new and more
terrible one, and the latest League of Peace would die.

Triumph for one side or the other, or exhaustion of both sides, would end
a war, and such was our indomitable spirit that we would turn back at once to
the arts of peace. Science all but conquered disease and began even to find
ways of combatting the slow deterioration of senility so that our life span
grew always longer.

Through the ravages of war and our other careless dealing with natural
resources, the area of tillable land kept lessening. But biologists
discovered how to grow our vegetable foods with their roots in liquid plasma
of inorganic salts that filled enormous trays, piled high in gigantic tiered
structures.

Domestic animals, too, were bred in factories rather than on farms. Huge
sheds of steel these were, miles long; their one end alive with the bawling
of cattle, the cackling of hens, the baaing of sheep, the other shaking with
the hammer and pound of the slaughtering and dressing machines; pouring forth
the products of an agriculture that had become a mechanized industry.

These agricoles were built near the cities whose population they
fed; and so, there being no longer need for any of us to live separated from
our fellows, we gathered together in the cities. These grew infinitely vaster
than we could have conceived in the Twentieth Century; but where there were
no cities the wilderness reclaimed its own, cloaking with tangled greenery
the unpeopled land.

Mile upon mile the cities stretched, great masses of concrete and steel.
Many-levelled they were, covered over against the elements by monstrous
shells, lighted no longer by the Sun, but by a cold and sourceless artificial
light that never lessened and never brightened.

The cities breathed air held to an even temperature, moistened to the
optimum degree, dustless and germless. Within them were the teeming warrens
where we dwelt; the throbbing, thunderous factories where we labored; arenas
for such sports as our thinning blood permitted us to partake in; theatres
and music halls. Threading the cities in soaring arabesques were the
street-ways, trafficless because their paving itself moved, slowly at the
outer margins, swifter and more swiftly towards the center. Always the Ways
were crowded, for there was no longer day or night for us but only the work
and rest and sleep periods that the Aristos decreed.

The Aristos were the brain of our body politic, the Leaders and Masters of
men. Obsolete as the chiefs of the ancient clans had become kings and
presidents, outmoded as the fire-centered tribal Councils were parliaments
and congresses. Forgotten except by some wild-eyed anachronisms was the
quaint idea that the State exists to serve its people, a contention as
fantastic as that a human body exists to serve the cells of which it is
composed.

The State, we had learned, was the be-all and end-all of life, each
citizen subordinate to its weal. Each contributed to the State the best that
he was able, each received from the State a recompense measured by what he
contributed.

Centuries of leadership, of training had endowed the Aristos with their
innate genius for management, their congenital fitness to govern. They were
the incarnation of the State, their decrees its laws, their will, its will.
They regulated our every act, set our every task, dictated our every thought,
ruled all the minutiae of our lives so that the State might best be
served.

It was their due, was it not, that they should be rewarded with every
luxury the civilization they created could produce? Was it not their right to
have first choice of all the best of life, even though the Plebos were by
millions the more numerous?

The Plebos carried out the behests of the Aristos, serving the State and
grateful that by being of use to the State they earned the right to live at
all. Cast by birth in a grosser mould, they were fit only to give to the
State their labor in time of peace, their bodies when war flared between the
cities.

Not that their labor was long or arduous. For this we had to thank the
Doctors of Learning, the Doctils.

A caste apart were the Doctils. Like the Plebos they were amenable to the
Aristos, but their rewards in luxury of living were but little, if at all,
inferior to those which accrued to the Masters themselves.

Magnificent were the Doctils' contributions to the State; in machines that
did all the world's work under the unremittent attendance of the Plebos; in
knowledge that probed the Universe for new ways to exalt the State. They gave
us stratcars that shuttled above earth's atmosphere and brought the farthest
distant of our cities within an hour's journey. They gave us spaceships that
visited Mars and Venus and fetched for us new and strange elements to make
more godlike our life. They fashioned for us our brave, new world.

It was the Doctils who made the State the efficient mechanism it had
become. Take, for instance, the matter of human procreation.

By the old, biological process, a full half of the Plebos, the females,
were incapacitated for their usual employment during the recurring periods of
gestation. This was, of course, a direct loss to the common weal, but the
disturbance to the State's economy did not end with that. Since the only
limits to life now were those set by war, and infrequent accident, there were
times when no additions to our population were required, others when great
numbers of Plebos were badly needed. But, utterly obedient to the decrees of
the Aristos as they were in all else, the Plebos could not be regimented in
their mating habits. This situation seriously threatened the meticulous
balance of work and workers that had been set up, and posed economic problems
not even the genius of the Aristos could solve.

The scientists changed all that in a single brilliant stroke. They devised
a method by which ova were removed from the human body, artificially
fertilized, and kept in a state of suspended animation until such time as
additions to the population were required. When the need arose, by various
ingenious processes the maturation of the stored eggs was brought about at
twenty times the previous rate, so that within one year exactly the desired
number of new Plebos at the efficient age were produced. Thus it became
possible to sterilize all male Plebos, and all but the comparatively small
number of females required to supply the basic ova. Thereafter, by certain
treatment of the growing embryos; only neuter Plebos were matured, except for
the few females, the Matras, required to replace those who for one reason or
another ceased to function.

The Aristos directed that the Doctils apply the process to their own class
as well as to the Plebos, but exempted themselves from it. Their superior
self-discipline, they proclaimed, rendered it needless as far as they were
concerned.

Oddly enough, the Doctils argued against this decree, maintaining that
they did not fall behind the Aristos in self-discipline. But their appeal was
denied, and there was nothing for them but to obey, since all the weapons
they had invented—the disintegrating rays, the atom bombs, the sonic
vibrators that changed the frequency of nervous impulses 'til those upon whom
they were focused became insane—were entirely in the hands of the
Aristos and none knew better than the scientists how futile opposition to
them would be.

So dreadful, indeed, were these weapons, that no City any longer dared to
make war upon another, and we knew peace at last had come to Earth.

For some centuries we occupied ourselves with the business of living. To
the Plebos it was a dreary business, because they were cogs in machines that
ran smoothly and without vibration and without purpose, unless that purpose
were to provide luxury for the Aristos.

The Doctils occupied themselves with the pursuit of ultimate knowledge,
and with many curious experiments, such as that of changing our shape and
form in better adaptation to the tasks set for us. The Aristos were amused by
the results of these trials, and mildly interested in the discoveries the
Doctils made as they probed even farther into the infinite and infinitesimal,
but mostly they were engrossed in their own sybaritic pleasures, pleasures
neither Doctils nor Plebos any longer could comprehend.

How could the sexless understand dalliance between male and female? How
could those whose very bodies had been changed so that they were fit only for
their assigned function in the economy of the State understand beauty of
sound or color or form? How could those whose every act was meshed into the
acts of those about them in absolute and rigid cooperation understand the joy
of competitive sport?

Somewhere in these centuries the Doctils learned how to transmute energy
into matter, so that no longer was it needful for our ships to ply space, nor
our stratcars to dart across the skies in trade between the Cities.

This was a consummation welcomed by us. The people of each city spoke
different languages, differed from one another in color, in cephalic
formation, in bony structure; hence they were natural enemies. As long as we
had been mutually interdependent for the unique resources of our contiguous
territories, we had been forced to maintain a certain basis for more or less
peaceful intercourse. Now the need for this was done away with. It took only
a brief conference of the Aristos of the world to decide upon a complete
severance of relations. The City shells were ordered permanently sealed
against entrance or exit and now each City was a world unto itself,
completely self-sufficient.

Man himself at last was completely self-sufficient, wholly independent of
Nature, wholly independent of all but his own powers. Two million years after
the first lunged fish crawled out of a steamy sea, Mankind had reached its
apogee.

"BUT THEY DENY JEHOVAH!" a sonorous voice thundered across the heavens.
"THEY SPURN THE ETERNAL. BEHOLD! THEY HAVE TURNED THEIR FACES FROM GOD AND HE
HAS TURNED HIS FACE FROM THEM AND LACKING HIS COUNTENANCE THEY MUST
PERISH."

I was vaguely aware that it was Elijah who had thus
broken into the
tremendous drama of Man's Destiny. As vaguely I was aware of the others who
shared with me this experience, but it seemed to me that someone was
missing.

"There is neither nobility nor chivalry among them." Arthur's voice was
something heard half dreaming, half waking. "Their rulers govern only for
themselves without obligation to their subjects..." It was all dim and unreal
but quite clearly there were six of us, not seven, as Orth's deep accents
rumbled, "Nothing but machines they are and like machines they work only how
and as long as they are ordered. There is not one who is loyal to his task or
to another. Not one..."

Evelyn was phantasmal, but wraithlike as she was there still was a thrill
for me in her bated whisper. "How terrible, Johnny. How very terrible. There
is no love in that world, no one to love..."

They were shimmering back into the blackness; Elijah, Arthur, Louis, John
Orth. Evelyn was fading as the blackness closed in; but where was Villon! He
had not spoken of the absence of Beauty from the drear world of Man's future.
He was gone from among us.

Was he only the first to go? Were we to vanish one by one while those who
remained were engrossed in this pageant of Man's Destiny? The blackness
became absolute again.

Once more we were part of the colossal drama, of the cosmic tragedy
that moved swiftly—now and inevitably to its final curtain.

Man had attained the ultimate. Within the sealed shells of the Cities we
had achieved perfection.

Between the Cities spread a dark and whispering wilderness. Through the
gloomy forest aisles of the Wastelands prowled wild beasts that had changed
but little from those that we had hunted—and feared—in the dim
and shadowed past. Out there the winds still seethed through rustling leaves,
streams still babbled down to an untracked sea, and the sun still shone, but
none of this had any meaning for us.

'Til, in Moska, farthest north of the Cities, the Plebos in charge of the
climate machines noted that these were speeding up beyond any rate known
before in their effort to warm to the thermostatically predetermined degree
the air drawn, through immense ducts, from outside the shell.

In accordance with regulations, this curious circumstance was reported to
the Aristos of Moska. These ordered their Doctils to investigate.

The Doctils checked the climate machines and found nothing wrong with
them. Their peculiar performance must be due to an unprecedented drop in the
temperature of the Wasteland air. The scientists made some adjustments in the
machines and requested permission of the Aristos to break the seals of the
City shell, so that they might determine just what changes were occurring
outside.

This permission the Aristos denied. The Doctils, they argued, were trying
to cover up some mistake of their own, or perhaps were even involved in some
conspiracy against the State. This accusation they held proven when the
scientists took the unprecedented step of persisting in their plea and dared
even to hint that the Aristos were something less than all-wise. The matter
was settled out of hand by a mass execution of all the Doctils of Moska. They
were, after all, no longer needed since Man had attained perfection.

The Aristos returned to their pleasures. The Plebos continued functioning
in the rhythmic routine of their labors. Nothing had changed. Nothing except
that the climate machines continued speeding up.

Then the enclosing shell of Moska commenced to groan under some
inexplicable pressure from without.

For the first time in memory, the Plebos were aware of an emotion—
that of apprehension. But habit confined them inexorably to their routine,
and it was the Aristos, themselves breaking the seals, who discovered that
Moska was doomed.

Mountains of ice, an endless continent of it, were moving down from the
Pole to swamp the City! It was possible that Doctils might have devised some
means of dissipating the ice or forcing it back, but there were no longer any
Doctils in Moska. As matters stood, there was no recourse but to abandon the
City before its human occupants were ground to pulp in the ruin of its
soaring structures.

The advance of the glacier, inevitable though it was, was infinitely slow
and the shell was very strong, so there was time to prepare an orderly
evacuation while messengers were dispatched in hastily reconditioned
stratcars to arrange for accommodation by the Cities of Berl, Par and Lond,
Moska's nearest neighbors.

Meantime, the far southern City of Melbour was commencing to have
difficulties with its own climate machines. These were as yet, however, not
serious enough to be alarming.

There was a great deal of confusion in Moska. The Plebos, wrenched from
their accustomed tasks, were bewildered. The Aristos, deprived of the
guidance of the Doctils, were not at all certain as to just what should be
done, or how. There was, however, nothing approaching panic until the
stratcars returned with their reports.

These were all three alike. Each crew had had trouble in penetrating the
shells of the Cities to which they had been sent. When they had succeeded in
this and delivered their plea, the answer in each case had been an immediate
and incontinent refusal.

"Moska's predicament is no concern of ours," the Aristos of Lond, for
example, had replied. "We see no reason to upset the balanced economy of our
State on behalf of strangers."

The consternation with which these reports were received was followed by
boiling wrath, and then a grim determination. "What they will not give us,"
was the decision, "we shall take."

A rending crash, the first crack of the shell, emphasized the need for
haste. Before the Great Glacier had advanced another meter, the sky was
darkened with a vast cloud of stratcars and rocket-ships, crewed with Plebos,
captained by Aristos.

The destruction of Moska was earth-shaking thunder in the north as its
fleets swept toward Berl and Par and Lond.

But these were not taken by surprise. They had sent spies on the trail of
the homing Moskvites to verify the truth of their tales, and these had
sounded the warning. Up from the threatened Cities leaped their own
myriad-numbered fleets and the enemies met fifty miles high over the
Wastelands.

An Inferno took possession of the startled silences of the
substratosphere; a hell of lancing, lethal beams, of crepitating ionic
discharges; a cataclysmic Hades of sounds that invaded men's brains and set
them mad.

Across the heavens that prodigious battle raged, and the heavens were a
sheet of flame out of which rained soot that had been men, and white-glowing
embers that moments before had been proud, space-eating ships and fleet
stratcars. The forests received this dust-hail of destruction, and the heat
of the disrupted atoms set fire to the forests, and the flame above was
matched by the searing spread of flame below.

For a little space the remnants of those mighty fleets still fought, and
that little while was sufficient to complete the contagion of disaster. While
the darting ion-lances of the cosmic annihilators, the radioactive blasts of
the atom bombs, and the beams of the disintegrators obeyed the laws of
ethereal vibration and sped off into outer space in straightline tangents
from Terra's globe, the maddening shrills of the sonic vibrators were
conducted to Earth's surface by its atmosphere, were carried to the Cities
not as yet involved in the explosion. High pitched and fiendish, they
penetrated the shells of Madri and of Byzant, of Ning and Tok and Nyork, and
curdled the brains of the Aristos and Doctils and Plebos that dwelt
there.

The madness seized upon all of us who heard those sounds, and none of us
escaped. We were stripped of all that the centuries had taught us, were left
only with what we had learned in the steamy jungles in whose treetops we had
swung chattering, in the caves where we had shivered with fear of the beasts
and hate for alien men ingrained itself in the germinal genes of our race.
The hordes were on themove! The enemy hordes were swooping down
upon us! If we did not kill them they would kill us.

Kill! Kill! KILL! KILL!

From Losan and Washton, from Alexan and Buenos and Capetin, burst our
fleets to hurricane across the world, seeking those of alien speech and alien
countenance who because they were different from us needs must be our
enemies.

We found one another in the screaming empyrean, we found those who sought
us as we sought them, and we shattered together with the crash of our atom
bombs and the lightnings of our disintegrators and the lunatic shriek of our
sirens.

Now the skies were a fury of death, and the face of the Earth was a
seething conflagration and the madness that wailed, "kill, kill, KILL,"
ringed the spinning sphere where Man had achieved the ultimate. The ultimate
in self- destruction, for nowhere on that blazing orb, nowhere in the
incandescent atmosphere enveloping it, could life longer exist.

There were no victors in that last war of all, and there were no
vanquished; for when the fires had burned themselves out Earth was a dead
planet, its flesh of soil blasted and torn and blackened, its bones of rock
melted into the tortured, nightmare skeleton of that which had been the Sun's
most favored child.

There could be no life left on such an Earth, but all Earth-life was not
extinct.

If, some centuries back, THE Aristos had not included the
Doctils in the
Law of Controlled Procreation, the Story of Mankind would now be ended.

Although they had ventured some feeble protest, the Doctils of the world
had accepted the edict—except for a certain one in Moska.

This one, Roya by name, had been perhaps the last human alive who did not
altogether subscribe to the doctrine of the State Supreme and to the
omniscience and omnipotence of the Masters.

Roya resented the Aristos' act, resented even more his fellow scientists
acquiescence therewith. He became definitely non-social. Hereafter, he
decided, he would share his accomplishments with no one. He would, moreover,
direct his researches toward the discovery of hitherto unknown natural laws,
and new applications of known laws, that would enable him eventually to gain
control of Moska, and then of the world, for himself.

Benefitting by the pooling of the thought of all the other Doctils of the
City while withholding the bulk of his own scientific achievements, Roya
forged far ahead of the rest of the fellowship of the Doctils. He learned
that beyond the identity of matter and energy was a more fundamental identity
of pure thought with both, and that this was the true reality. He learned the
nature of Time; that the Past and the Future coexist with the Present, and he
learned how to move pastward along Time's flux, though he did not quite solve
the problem of how to take himself futureward. He learned how to warp Space
at will, so that at will he could place himself instantaneously at any point
in its infinity.

So many avenues of speculation did his discoveries open up that even
Roya's great brain faltered at the task of exploring them all. He required
aid, but he dared not communicate his knowledge and his intentions to any
man. They would without any measure of doubt be reported at once to the
Aristos, and these would at once move to purge him. He was not yet quite
ready for a test of his powers, not yet quite sure that single-handed he
could defeat a world.

His dilemma he solved thus: He brought about an accident in which a score
or so of Plebos were killed. When the maturation of a sufficient number of
fertilized ova to replace them was commenced, Roya managed to be assigned to
the task and contrived to abstract from the storage trays five additional
eggs. The nutrient baths in which these were placed he secretly adjusted so
that they would mature as Doctils possessed of all his own store of knowledge
and with his own non-social psychology.

In a year Roya would have help in his great project, five Doctils who
would not betray him. But Roya did not live quite to the end of that year. He
was one of the scientists purged when the first premonition of the Glacier
brought about the dispute between them and the Aristos.

The interval between that incident and the departure of the Moskvite
fleets for their attack on their neighboring Cities was just about sufficient
for the five to reach their full growth. Completely armed with their foster-
father's omniscience, they were at once aware of the implications of what was
occurring and knew instantly what they must do to escape the catastrophe. The
general confusion made it easy for them to seize Moska's largest spaceship,
kill its Aristo officers and get it safely away from Earth before the sonic
vibrators commenced spreading their contagion of madness. Within our
spaceship now were all that remained of Man: we five newfledged Doctils, our
ship's crew of a hundred Plebos and a single Matra, an egg-bearing female
that Daster had had the inspiration to include in our cargo.

Included in that freight was also a complete assortment of the various
devices our civilization had produced, so that our vessel was a microcosmic
City as self-contained and as self-sufficient as any of those that now had
been blasted into nonexistence. In a manner that with his inability to travel
into the Future Roya could not have foreseen we who owed our existence to him
had absolute dominion over the destiny of our race.

"It is," Bolar thought to us, "as if this ship were the germinal cell from
which a new and greater civilization will evolve."

"Aye," sighed Daster. "But where? See. Earth is now a whirling cinder,
heated by the fires of its immolation."

"It will cool," Favril reminded him.

"It will cool," Astaris agreed. "And then the ice will form again at the
Poles, and creep down once more over the blackened desolation 'til the
grinding masses meet at the Equator. A thousand years, and more, it will be
before they once more retreat. A thousand years—Do we wish to wait that
long before we rebuild our home?"

Favril had a suggestion. "There are the other planets, brothers. Mars,
Perhaps, or Venus—"

"Neither," Gohret interrupted, "will support life in the form we know
it."

"Then we can change our form of life," Favril argued, "to meet the
conditions on either." But he himself was halfhearted in advancing the idea,
and none thought it necessary to voice the veto all agreed upon.

Our head-membranes throbbed with an adumbration of despair and in the
brains of more than one of us there was a flicker of something not quite
thought suggesting that it might be best to flash our ship and all it
contained into oblivion. But there is a Natural Law that compels every entity
to cling to the preservation of its kind.

"I have it!" Daster's thought-waves impacted on our receptors. "There is
no place for us in the Solar System, nor in the Galaxy of which it is a part.
But somewhere among the myriads upon myriads of planetary bodies with which
Space is filled, somewhere between infinity and infinity, must be another orb
upon which the conditions are enough like Terra's for it to afford us
shelter. Let us find it, brothers!"

"Let us find it!" our minds took up the cry, and at once we were
projecting ourselves through the endless reaches of the Universe in such a
search as even Roya would have been hard put to it to conceive.

Beyond Pluto, beyond Andromeda, beyond Suns whose light would have taken a
billion years to reach us, we probed the Universe. Not in actuality. That
monumental exploration of ours carried not one proton of us beyond the walls
of our rocketship. It was mathematical, our hunt for a home for the life that
was in our charge. It was a matter of unreeling countless formulae, of
tracing countless curves, of an infinity of calculations based upon the
infinity of data we had been born possessed of through the genius of our
fosterfather, Roya.

And when it was ended, the result was this: Nowhere in the Universe was
there any orb duplicating exactly the conditions on Terra. Only one planet, a
million galaxies away, would support life in anything like the form we wished
to preserve it. Only one.

It was Bolar whose calculations lit upon this. We checked, rechecked, his
figures and found them faultless.

"We know where we want to go," Gohret summed it up. "Let us go there." But
we still hesitated, gazing upon devastated Earth, upon white blazing Sun and
its attendant planets wheeling about it, upon the golden constellations that
we were about to leave forever. Though in point of personal life we were but
hours old, compact within us were the history and the memories of our race;
and these whirling orbs, these spangled skies, were the very warp and woof of
our being.

Something held us, some inchoate and wordless nostalgia unworthy of
creatures of perfect science, of perfect mind, such as we were.

"Let us go." Gohret the implacable recalled us to our task.

None of us had actually warped space to translate himself across it, but
we knew how it must be done and we knew that it must be done just so or
irretrievable disaster would overtake us. The disaster of a timeless,
spaceless state of being, of a non-existence that was yet existence; endless,
hopeless, the incarnation of eternal despair.

Five of us there were, and a hundred Plebos and one Matra, and we were all
that was left of Man. One minutest error in what we were about to do would
end humankind forever.

We set the proper forces at work in the proper manner.

Then—

Grayness. Non-being absolute. Non-knowledge. Only a terrible fear, a
terrible certainty, that the error had been made and we were doomed eternally
to this cognizant oblivion.

Our spaceship, the hundred and six of us within it, hung motionless at the
upper limit of a sunless, brown sky such as no Man had ever viewed. Below was
a quarter sphere of the planet we had traversed the Galaxies to seek and we
knew at once that life was possible upon it, because there was life
upon it.

What we could see of the world to which we had come was a level plain from
over whose horizon stalked colonnades of pastel-hued, immense pillars that
converged at its center on a mountain black and lustreless as the starless
wastes between the nebulae. The wide paths set off by these roofless
palisades, close-packed with the planet's denizens, seemed straight-banked
dark rivers flowing toward the stygian pile that focussed them, and from
those marching myriads a tidal wave of cadenced sound welled up to us.

A chorus of countless voices, the paean was yet a single, harmonious
whole. There was solemnity to it, and awe, yet there was to it also joy and
an exceeding ecstasy.

We could not read the meaning of that hymn. The meaning was not thought
but an emotion that held those thousands upon thousands in a single
thrall, and Earthman had so long ago discarded emotion that its very nature
was forgotten. But we knew that it was inspired by the monstrous black
mountain —

It was no mountain, or rather it was a mountain carved into a stupendous
image of a hooded Being neither man nor beast, but transcending both.

It was not the image itself to which the emotion vocalised by a world's
song was directed, but that which it depicted; not in form, because the Being
had no form, but in representation of Its attributes. This much, gazing upon
it, we could understand, but what those attributes were we could not
comprehend, nor how any living race could worship them as this one did.

Curiously enough, we were aware that if we held our attention upon that
monument for more than a brief instant, or longer permitted ourselves to hear
the organ tones welling about us, we should be unable to do that which we had
come to do. So at once we ordered our Plebos to the armament of our ship and
they loosed their bolts upon the singing masses below.

The plain heaved in a vast shattering. The splendid, tall pillars
collapsed upon the worshippers who had marched between them singing and now
screamed their terror at the sudden destruction that came upon them without
warning. No hymn now, but shrieks, shrilled through the crashing chaos of a
world disrupted, through the rending of rock whose very atoms were being
smashed into their component atoms, through he pealing thunders of the doom
we had hurled upon them.

A cloud of dust rose out of the slaughter, and enveloped the orb below us.
The cloud was luminous with the greens and scarlets and blinding blues of our
armament, and it was black with the agony it concealed...

"Cruel. Oh, cruel." Eve's horrified whisper lay somewhere within
the heart of that terrible spectacle. "They are not men, they're glorified
beasts, Johnny. It can't be that this is what the years will make of
people like you and me!"

Enough of my own personality had shimmered back that I might have answered
her, but I did not. I could only have reminded her of fiery destruction
raining from Twentieth Century skies on screaming women, and little children,
on humans guiltless and unwarned kneeling at prayer in the cathedrals of
their faith...

It was not our intention to destroy that race entirely, not at least until
we could determine whether they might in some manner be of use to us and so
we ordered our weapons shut off while still there was some evidence of life
below. One disintegrator, throttled to minimum power, we used to sweep the
veiling vapors out of the atmosphere.

The plain was a vast tumulus of rocky shards piled helter-skelter. The
singing thousands were dissipated into their primal atoms, so that it was as
if they had never been, but here and there gray-purple masses heaved in
shocked and aimless movement.

The monument rose from that desert of desolation, its configuration
altered hardly at all. Its miles-long body was still haunched as it had been,
its great head poised neckless on gargantuan shoulders as before the
holocaust.

Not quite as before. It must be because some fragments had been riven from
it, that it seemed to have moved slightly, so that the hooded eyes appeared
now to be directed towards us, hanging high above.

There was a sudden coldness within us, a sudden incomprehensible something
that might be fear. And yet we sensed no anger in that veiled, quiet glance,
no menace. Only a waiting, endlessly patient.

Strange, then, that in our moment of triumph, in the moment that we had
proved ourselves masters of the universe and of all Life, we should be
afflicted by this curious Unease.

Our attention returned to those that were left of the
planet's animate
inhabitants, was returned to them by a wave of cold hostility, of hate and
malevolence, of determination to resist us until none of them were left. The
wave was thought, the single thought of the masses below that were writhing
back to awareness, and we could not tolerate it.

That hate would render them useless to us and we could make use of the
drina—so we were aware now they called themselves—as slaves. The
problem was easy to solve. We had not yet used our sonic vibrator. We reduced
its power and stepped up its frequency 'til it emitted a whistle just within
the threshold of audibility, and we unloosed that whistle on the remnants of
the conquered race.

The masses shuddered momentarily, then were still. The drina were mindless
now, whatever intelligence they'd possessed destroyed. They were ours to
control as we controlled the Plebos we had brought with us, as we controlled
the ship whose shell enclosed us.

We zoomed downward to take possession of our new home.

Our attack upon the planet had blasted its surface into a wilderness of
tumbled rock and had destroyed all evidence of the drina's
civilization, but these circumstances exactly suited our purpose. We could
fashion a city here that would equal or surpass any that had existed on
Earth, and from the ova with which our Matra would supply us we could people
it with exactly the form of humanity we desired.

We decided to plan carefully and without haste. We would, for the present,
merely construct a temporary abode. Having recuperated from the tremendous
drain on our vitality that all we had accomplished had entailed, we would
design a Super-State.

Pursuant to this decision, we hollowed out for ourselves a smooth pit as
distant from the disturbing black image as we could. From the molten rock
with which our disintegrators thus furnished us, we moulded a number of
structures to temporarily house ourselves, the freight of our rocketship, the
Plebos and the Matra. For some not very well apprehended reason, we designed
Adalon on the plan of the Solar System we had abandoned forever.

As matters of reasonable precaution we surrounded the bowl with a Veil of
Ishlak, a wall of force impenetrable unless it is opened by controls from
within, and assigned certain of the Plebos to roam the lands beyond the Veil,
keeping watch on the drina.

Having thus set matters in order, we rested and refreshed ourselves for a
space, and then called the first council of our Kintat of Doctils.

"I am aware of a curious feeling of dissatisfaction," Favril opened the
council. "Although when I proposed that We remain within the confines of our
System, I was compelled to acknowledge that your arguments against it were
very cogent, I still feel that I was not altogether wrong."

"In spite of the fact that Bolar's calculations have proved to be correct
and we find here a temperature and humidity, a gravity, a range of elements,
sufficiently like those of Terra to make it possible for our form of life to
exist, I yet sense in the very environment some intangible hostility to
Mankind that makes me doubt the success of our experiment."

"What would you have?" Gohret demanded. "A world ready made for us?"

"Precisely," Daster responded. "We abandoned Earth because it is a denuded
sphere. Have we anything better here? Is not the same amount of labor
required to make this planet tenable as would have been required had we
returned to Terra? And there we would have been where we belong."

"That is it!" Favril exclaimed. "That is what troubles me. We do not
belong here. We are resented by the very ground, by the very rocks. We have
vanquished its inhabitants, but the planet itself rejects us. It is because
of this, vaguely realized, that we built Adalon as we did, to comfort
us."

Gohret's answer to that was a sneer. "Earth, too, rejected us. Mait's
folly completed the catastrophe that ended Man's life on Earth, but a natural
phenomenon, the advent of a new Glacial Age, was the spark that initiated the
cataclysm. Had Lond and Par and Berl taken us in, still would the ice have
advanced, pinching us between its walls, 'til we should have been
obliterated."

"Not so," Daster objected. "Had we not shut ourselves away from Nature,
had we kept in touch with it, we should have found a way to avoid disaster.
The genius of Man was unconquerable, as long as Man cooperated with Nature
and did not war against it."

"The mistake was made," Bolar offered, "when the City shells were
sealed—"

"No," Favril cut in. "When the Law of Controlled Procreation was decreed
and Man became a designed creation of Man himself."

"We started to go wrong long before that," Bolar ventured. "I think it was
when the Agricoles were perfected and men abandoned the good ground for the
cities. That was when we definitely turned our back upon natural evolution
and—"

"You are all tight, and you are all wrong," Astaris said softly. "All you
mention was done because Man had become wholly a thinking machine, had
forgotten certain basic urges not susceptible to reason but very necessary to
his happiness. Only their names are left to us, their meaningless names.
Love. Loyalty. Obligation. Beauty. And Faith. Faith above all."

"All this is futile," Gohret drowned him out, harshly. "What is done, is
done. Only what is still to be done concerns us. Our future lies on this
planet. We cannot return to the Solar System, to Earth—"

"Ah, but we can," Astaris answered. "We can go back to Earth, and to an
Earth renewed and vigorous, fully fitted for the Super- Civilization we
intend to erect. We can correct all the errors our predecessors have
made."

"How?"

"By returning not only in Space but in Time to our native sphere.
Here is what I propose. Let us consolidate our position here, but only
temporarily. Let us scout all history for those among our ancestors in whom
the traits I have mentioned were best developed, bring them here, and probe
them for the secrets of those emotions. Having found them, let us adjust the
nurture of the new race we are founding to include those traits. This having
been done, we can—"

"Select the period of Earth's geological evolution," Gohret snatched the
thesis from him, "when natural conditions were most favorable—"

"I've calculated it," Bolar put in. "The Twentieth Century—"

"So long ago!" Favril exclaimed.

"So long ago. That was when the interrelation of Man and Nature was at its
best and that was when Man began to gain that ascendancy over Nature that
eventually led to his undoing. My figures are irrefutable."

"Very well," Gohret took back the current of thought. "We'll try Astaris'
project. When it is successfully terminated, or we find it futile, as I think
more probable, we shall return to Earth of the Twentieth Century. We shall
take possession of it in the same manner that we have taken possession of
this planet, destroy or enslave its denizens, repopulate it with the
younglings; we shall create from the ova our Matra bears within her. With our
limitless knowledge, our inheritance of two million years of evolution, what
wonders shall we not bring to pass! Done, brothers?"

Blackness blotted out that moment conference of the Kintat,
blackness
absolute. Within that blackness I was rigid, all my bodily warmth gone,
unable to think, aware only that I had heard pronounced the doom of my
people, that I had heard sentence passed on it of destruction, immediate and
terrible.

I no longer was Man in General, living the history of mankind through the
ages. I was John March, lawyer, born June twelfth, nineteen hundred and
twenty into a good, green world I loved. It was my New York, my America, that
these soulless, ruthless beings intended to seize for their own. It was the
boys and girls with whom I had grown up that they were going to destroy or
enslave. It was the fellows who'd sweated over our studies with me, who'd
chased a pigskin up and down the field beside me. It was the one-armed
newsdealer on the corner, and the people who jostled me in the subway, it was
Pierpont Alton Sturdevant, and Mary, the pert-nosed telephone girl in the
reception room, and the cop who'd handed me a ticket for speeding, whom they
would treat as they had treated the drina hymning their God!

Evelyn formed out of the blackness, straight and slender as a naiad, a
horror akin to my own graven on her dear face. Arthur and Orth were real
again, straddle-legged, their fists clenched on their useless weapons. Louis
Capet was a shaking, terrified little boy—

Elijah's right hand was raised above the shaggy, silver crown of his great
head. His face was upturned to the high, vaulted roof of the vast nave, and
his lips were moving in prayer to the Jehovah who was not there above him,
nor anywhere in this space or this time. I heard him. I heard the eternal
plaint of his people from his lips, the plaint that was now for me the plaint
of all the people of my world and my time. "My God," the sonorous
Hebrew rolled from those lips. "My God, why hast thou forsaken
me!"

But I could see Francois Villon nowhere.

"John March!" It was the inner voice of the Future Man that called my
name. "John March!" The goldenlighted niche was visible again in the topless,
ebony wall, and within it there was not the five Doctils of the Kintat, but
only one! Achronos Astaris! "We have told you what we want of you, and we
have shown you why. We have shown you that we had no need to make a bargain
with you, and yet, having made it, we have kept it. Now we call upon you and
your companions to yield to us that which we desire, promising in exchange to
return you to the location in Time and Space from which we brought you here
and now."

Somehow I found my voice. "So that we may be destroyed along with the
rest?"

"Only you and Evelyn Rand are of the Twentieth Century. The others will
live out their span, all memory of their adventure here blotted from their
minds."

"And we two?"

"Will also remember nothing, but will die or be enslaved as chance may
dictate, when we descend upon your world."

My neck corded, so that for a moment my defiant reply was choked within my
throat. In that moment, Eve's hand was on my arm, her taut voice in my
ear.

"Our choice is only between death and death, Johnny, and as long as we die
together I don't care at all. The others have a real choice. Let them
answer."

She was right! I turned to them, my loved one in the circle of one arm.
"It's your chance, my friends," I said, smiling. We were set apart from them,
Eve and I, but we were one, completely and wholly one, and for that moment
nothing else really mattered to me. I had lost hope and life and a world, but
I had gained her. Everything after that would be anticlimax. "Take it."

Elijah's dark and brooding eyes came down from communion with the Eternal
to fasten on the bizarre creature in the recess. The Dauphin straightened and
was no longer a frightened lad, but the scion of a king. Arthur was regal in
every line of his great body, his purple robes imperial. Orth was granite-
countenanced, expressionless.

Where was Villon?

"What is your answer?" the Doctil demanded, and there was a curious
impatience in the way he did so. An odd exigency.

It was Louis' high pipe that sounded first, the thin voice of a little
boy. "For myself the answer is—No!"

"And for me," Orth's deep tones echoed him. "No!"

"The devil and all his fiends take you," King Arthur boomed. "Rather than
live as poltroons, we choose to die as men!"

The Hebrew prophet was the last, statuesque in his white robes, his
hawkbeaked countenance dark as doom. His bearded lips moved. "Ye have
abandoned God. Can I give God back to you?"

They had their faults each of these men, the faults of the times and the
kinds of humans they represented. Elijah, was the prophet of a creed that
could be cruel and relentless, a creed one of whose dogmas was, "An Eye for
an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth." Underlying the magnificent pageantry of King
Arthur's Age of Chivalry had been thousands of the disinherited; rags for
their clothing, straw for their beds, bones to gnaw for food and unremitting,
hopeless toil for their way of life. The Dauphin was the last of a dynasty
that had ground and oppressed a nation, without conscience and without mercy.
John Orth had been bred in an Imperial Court whose intrigue and chicanery and
diplomacy of exploitation was to bring about the first World War and its grim
aftermaths.

But Astaris had offered them life, the living out of their lives as those
lives were meant to be lived, instead of a grisly death. Neither their world
nor their own consciences would know what they had done, nor reproach them
for having done it, yet they had the courage and the integrity to refuse
him.

When I turned back to Astaris I sensed that he shared my admiration for
them. I sensed, too, a certain sadness, a certain disappointment.

"Consider again," he insisted. "Consider that whether or not you give us
what we ask, we shall nevertheless possess ourselves of Earth of the
Twentieth Century. With or without the knowledge we seek from you, we shall
carry out our plan. You cannot stop us."

What I said in reply was inane and without meaning and vainglorious. But I
am not sorry I said, "We can try, Astaris. We can try our damndest."

Our damndest would be little indeed against him and his mates, who were
masters of a knowledge I could not even attempt to comprehend, but I had to
fling that defiance at him and I felt more of a man for having done so.

"Give us strength, Oh Eternal," I heard Elijah behind me, "to endure what
it is Thy will we shall endure." Then Arthur's voice was booming, "Have at
him brothers. Take him for hostage!" and the huge, purple-robed form was
surging past me, Excalibur flashing above its flowing blonde locks.
Orth pounded beside Arthur, and beside Orth the boy ran, lithe and
pantherlike.

And I had joined them. It might work! If we could make Astaris our
prisoner—"Down, Orth," I cried, still scheming, lawyer-like. "Down on
your hands and knees to make a spring-board for us." He went down as I said,
at the base of the wall, and Arthur was leaping from his back for the niche,
and had made it. Louis bounded high, reached the recess. My own feet felt
John Orth's back. My knees bent, straightened, threw me in such a jump as I'd
never yet made, to join the two others.

Arthur's sword-arm was caught helpless in the coils of Astaris' one
tentacle. The other wrapped Louis' waist and held his kicking, flailing body
too far from the Doctil to reach him with his dagger. Elijah, amazingly here,
sprang with me in between the two, the prophet's gnarled hands clawed, my own
fisted and flailing.

My fists never landed. Something caught my arms, pinned them. A dark
tentacle squeezed my chest, numbing me. Had Astaris sprouted another? No. A
Plebo held Elijah in a similar grip. I twisted my head and saw that it was a
Plebo too who held me. Others came through the backwall of the niche, wrested
away Arthur's sword, plucked the Dauphin's weapon from his fingers. Astaris
released Arthur and the youngster to Plebos, who held them helpless.

A scream, shrill and terror-filled, cut through to me. Evelyn's scream! It
gave me strength to drive legs into the floor, fighting madly to get loose. I
staggered my captor, wrestled him around, but could not get free of him. The
crowding, bulbous forms of the Doctil's bodyguard hid Eve from me. Her scream
had choked off.

I tried to call to her, but a splayed hand was clamped over my mouth. I
could see neither Astaris nor my companions in the attack on him. Around me
were only the Plebos' great, goggling eyes, their tiny mouths, their pulsing
head-membranes. The golden light was fading. The explosion of super-strength
Evelyn's cry had aroused in me was gone. I slumped, nerveless with fear for
her but emptied of strength and hope.

The crowd of Future Men seemed somehow thinner. I heard Arthur, below me.
"Nay, there is no need to keep tight hold of me. I have yielded." I heard
Evelyn. "Have they hurt you, Johnny?" All tenderness. "Johnny, have they hurt
you?"

And I heard a reply. "No, dear. I'm all right." My voice. In timbre
and accent, my voice. But I had not spoken!

I lifted my head, my brow wrinkling. The niche was black-dark now, but the
blocking Plebos were gone and there was light enough out there in the vast
vault that I could look out and down to its floor. The group down there was
moving away. Guarded by three Plebos, I saw Elijah's majestic form, Arthur's.
I saw Orth. The Dauphin. Evelyn.

Someone walked beside Evelyn, his arm thrown protectingly across her
shoulders. Had Villon returned? No. The man was taller than the poet, more
heavily built. He was dressed in a very modern brown suit. His hair was a
reddish brown, and something about the poise of his head was familiar.

He turned as if to answer some remark of Evelyn's.

I made out very clearly, a semi-circular scar on his left cheek.

I made out his profile.

It was mine!

It was I who walked beside Evelyn, talked to her. It was I against whom
she shrank, finding courage in the feet of my arm, strength in my nearness to
meet whatever fate the Plebos marched her off to.

How could I be there, and here too?

"Evelyn!" I shouted. "That's not—" And checked, realizing that the
Plebo's palm on my lips muffled my cry. I kicked backward, felt my heel
crunch against the pipestem leg of my captor, lurched forward. Went over the
niche edge, thudded on the floor below. A weight smothered me and something
pounded the side of my head, pounded me down into a sick oblivion.

I lay on the bosom of a shoreless, turgid tide that heaved beneath me. My
throat was parched. My head seemed to have ballooned to quadruple its normal
size. This was the granddaddy of all hangovers, all right. I couldn't
remember where I'd accumulated it, though I recalled very vividly the
nightmare I'd just been riding, with its weird mess of Future Men and men out
of the past; I recalled something about a terrible doom that overhung the
world. Evelyn Rand had been in the dream, of course. I'd found her and had
fallen in love with her and she with me, but the dream had wound up with me
watching myself walk away from myself, having stolen my girl from me.

Well, I'd better get up and fix myself a Prairie Oyster and try to get
into shape. Old Persimmon Puss Conklin will give me the fish eyes if I come
strolling into the office late, and the Head will be sure to hear that I
displayed every evidence of having had a hard night out.

Without trying to unglue my eyelids, I shoved myself up, groaning.
Gingerly balancing on my aching shoulders that grossly enlarged head of mine,
I wiggled a leg sidewise to get it down off the edge of the bed.

It wouldn't go down. The devil! Was I paralyzed? No liquor ever hit me
this hard before. Wonder who brought me home. Or am I home? Bed feels awful
damned hard. Better get eyes open and look around.

I went to work on the left one first. It slit, widened. And then the right
flew open, and I was jumping to my feet.

I hadn't been able to get my leg down because it was already down. The bed
was so hard because it was the stone floor of a small, cell- like chamber
whose walls, polished, blue-gray rock, had neither window nor door, nor
opening of any kind. I looked up. The blue-gray ceiling was solid as the
walls.

It was no nightmare I'd been living. It was stark, incredible reality. I
was a prisoner of the Doctils, in the Land where Time is Not, and Evelyn
—

Was Evelyn already out on the plain, prey to the drina! Why she and
not me? Why had she and the others been taken off, and I left behind? It was
I who'd led the fight against the Doctils, I who had engaged in an unequal
battle of wits with them. Why should I be spared-? Wait. Hadn't I seen myself
being marched off with the others, brown suit, scarred cheek—

Hold everything! That had not been I out on the black floor. It couldn't
have been. Even the Doctils, with all their million years advantage over the
science I knew, couldn't make two of me, each complete.

I stood rigid in the center of that cell, trembling a little as I tried to
recall every detail of what had occurred. There had been our attack on
Astaris, the incursion of the Plebos to frustrate it. Fighting uselessly with
the one who'd seized me, I'd lost sight of my companions, of Astaris. When
that futile fight was over, I'd glimpsed the men of my own time again, and
Evelyn. But—I was certain of it now—nowhere had I seen
Astaris.

While that fight was going on, the girl had been hidden from me by the
crowding Plebos. By the same token, I must have been hidden from her. I still
had been hidden from her when it was over, but she spoke to me.

I could almost hear her now, "Johnny, are you hurt?"

It wasn't of me she had asked that, then, but of my double. And it was my
double who had replied, in a perfect imitation of my voice. "No, dear. I'm
all right." King Arthur had already been taken down out of the niche, and so
probably had the others. I should have been taken down out of it too, unless
there was a definite reason why I should not.

Was it by accident that the Plebos had crowded around me, hiding me from
my friends? Hiding me from Evelyn? Very little the Future Men did was
accidental.

I recalled how Astaris had projected Evelyn's presence, her personality,
before me in that Brooklyn house. I recalled how, in a twinkling, Daster had
taken on the exact appearance, the mannerisms, of a professor of my own
time.

If I were building up a case in court, I could have established no better
one to confirm the startling hypothesis I had not yet dared to put into
words. Opportunity: A brawling fight in which I'd been concealed from view.
Ability: Demonstrated.

My double was Astaris! Achronos Astaris had assumed my shape, my
voice. He had become me!

Motive? The caress in his tones, his arm tender across Eve's shoulder,
betrayed that. By spying, by threats, by persuasion, the Doctil had failed to
wring from Evelyn and me the secret of the love that lay between us, but he
had not given up. He was trying another method now. Somewhere, in his
wandering through the ages, he had become aware of the fact that love often
begets love. He knew that Evelyn loved me. By becoming me he would become the
object of her love and perhaps it would arouse that emotion in him so that he
could study it by introspection.

"Damn him!" I cursed aloud. "Oh damn him!" shaken by a white and
blistering rage, a jealous fury that blazed through my veins. And then I
realized that I should be grateful, instead, that the Doctil had evolved this
scheme.

As long as he still thought that it might work, Evelyn was safe. It was a
greater protection for her than any I could give her.

What protection could I give her, what help could I be to her, against the
Future Men? Physically, I was no match for them. Mentally, they had
outmaneuvered my every attempt to match wits with them. But there was no
shame in that. Not Einstein, not Michelson or Compton, not all of the
outstanding intellects of my world and my age would make a better showing,
pitted against them.

That might happen too. That would happen. It was only a matter of
time. When they were ready—

The full and terrible implication of their plans, its promise of disaster
to the civilization out of which I'd been plucked, swept down on me like a
tangible black pall. I had flung defiance at them, but that defiance had been
meaningless as the snarl of a week-old kitten at a Great Dane.

I stared at the seamless stone wall of my prison, stared at visions of New
York's sky-reaching towers shattering down on terror- ridden crowds that fled
to safety where there was no safety, of humans shrivelling in the blast of
rays seething out of a menacing sky, of a civilization gone mad with the mad
sound that filled the air, of flame-eyed men killing, killing one another,
their arms, their clawed hands, dripping with gore.

And when the cataclysm was ended, I imagined the pitiful, mindless
remnants of my race enslaved to the creatures of the Future who claimed to be
men—"John!" A voice penetrated these appalling mental pictures. "It is
you, my old. It is verily you!"

His velvet doublet more ragged than ever, the lace at his wrists and his
throat more dingy, but with the same jaunty swagger to his meagre form, the
same mocking smile on his thin, scar-twisted lips, Francois Villon stood
beside me!

"Francois!" I gasped. "Where—how did you get in here? Where have you
been? How-?"

"Softly!" Villon had laid a long finger beside his hawklike nose. "Softly,
my cabbage. If you will permit me to answer one query before you prod me with
another—I entered this cell in the same manner you were brought here,
through its wall."

"Through-! Then there's a secret door—"

"My liver, John, no! They are solid of stone, all four walls, floor and
ceiling. It is through the solid stone I came, as they do, by help of this."
There was, in the hand he held out to me, a tiny mechanism of what seemed
like platinum wiring and glass or fused quartz. "The Doctils need little
beside the power of their brains to perform their magic, but the Plebos are
of lesser mould. They require this—key, shall we name it for want of a
better term—to translate themselves through matter without door or
aperture. It is of a Plebo I had it, the one I saw carrying you off, when I
returned to join you in the Hall of Miracles. He did not hear me follow him,
nor will he miss what I have taken from him." He touched, delicately, the
hilt of his poniard, and I saw at the throat of its scabbard an edging of
red, sticky wet that had wiped from the blade as it slid into its tight
sheath.

"The poet," Villon smiled slyly, "is also a master thief."

And a Paris apache, I thought, recalling what I had read of this strangest
character in all literature. "Where did they take Evelyn and the others?" I
asked him, trying not to repress a shudder at the way he could blandly smile,
after what he had done.

"Nay, that I do not know. They were out of sight. Perhaps, if I had
returned a moment sooner—" he shrugged his bony shoulders.

"Returned from where? When I saw you were gone I thought they had taken
you—"

"They did not take me. I went of my own accord, and they did not know it.
I—"

"They did not know! But they can read our thoughts. How-?"

"Name of a dog, but you make one imbecile with your questions! They read
our thoughts only when they bend their own upon ours. To show us the scenes
they cast upon the screen of the wall, to bring us into them as part of them,
demanded all of their minds, to watch them took all the minds of you others.
But me, I shut out from mine that shadow-play and watched the Doctils
themselves, hoping that in an unguarded moment I might see something that
might be of aid to us."

"And you did?"

He shrugged again, and though he still smiled, I thought there was a
shimmer of fear in his eyes. "I saw something, but whether it gives us hope
or is the death of all hope for us, I do not yet know. A long space of time I
saw only five shapes in a high niche from which the golden light had faded,
five monstrous shapes wholly intent on seizing our senses to make them toys
of their wills. Fighting that intent, I sweated like a whipped coach horse.
Then there was a stir among them. The strain upon me loosened, and meseemed
some distracting word had come to them. I recall that there was a stir among
you others also, as though their grip upon you had grown less strong."

"We came to ourselves," I interrupted, "for a moment or so. I wonder if it
was then."

"Aye," Villon nodded. "It may well have been, for methought I heard Elijah
cry out something about denying God. But four of the five Doctils were
hastening away, and I did not turn for I was skulking after them and feared
to lose sight of the four in the dimness."

Four. One had remained behind. It had taken the whole Kintat to hypnotize
us so that we seemed to relive the whole evolution of civilization and its
destruction, but once we were under the influence, Astaris had been able to
hold us alone.

"They went out of that Hall of Midnight," Villon continued, "and out of
the House of Sun. Me, I dared not emerge to the open, for fear that I might
be spied."

"You stopped!" I exclaimed. "You let them get away from you!"

"Name of the name of a dog, will you let me tell my tale? What I saw, I
saw, and if you have no wish to learn what that was, I am content to make
silent."

"I'm sorry, Villon," I apologized. "I'll keep still. What did you
see?"

"Nothing, at first, for that a white glare filled the Bowl of Adalon, and
it blinded my eyes that were used to the dimness. There was a vast hissing in
the sky, like a thousand flying serpents giving vent to their hate of our
captors. I peered on high, striving to make out whence came that monstrous
reptilian sound.

"The white light streamed from the top of the tower we saw building, that
top ablaze as though it had impaled the Sun. The glare roofed the pit, from
rampart to rampart of the cliffs that form it. It was only stray beams from
it that dazzled me below, up there it was a very white hell of light in which
nothing could live.

"Adown the walls of the bowl dribbled streamlets, graypurple and slow, as
though at the brink of the cliffs the light from the tower melted something
like fire melts wax. And this indeed was the case, as I descried when my
aching sight became more accustomed to the glare.

"Circling the verge of the Bowl a dark cloud lay against the Veil of
Ishlak, a heaving cloud that was not a cloud at all but thousands upon
thousands of the weird creatures that people the plains where we found each
other, you and I. The drina. The Veil, or so it seemed to me, was a little
rent here and there, and where it was rent the gray- purple flesh of the
drina oozed through, striving to rend the Veil still further, and there that
flesh was melting in the white blaze from the tower and running in slow
streamlets down the cliffs."

"I thought the Veil was impenetrable," I could not keep from again
breaking into Villon's narrative, "unless the Future Men opened it themselves
from some control down here."

"So it is," Francois agreed. "The drina masses boiled, behind each opening
in it, about a stratcar, its shining plates torn apart, its shining form
crushed. The Veil had been opened in each of those places to let a stratcar
through, and some of the drina had blocked its closing again, were writhing
through while their fellows swamped the flying machines that had been sent to
hold them off while the tower was being completed. The drina were writhing
through, and the blaze from the tower, now completed, was melting them as
fast as they oozed through, and still they came in an implacable dark tide of
hate."

"God," I whispered, "they're brave. No human army—"

"Not brave," Villon denied, "but mad. The drina know no fear, my John,
because they are without minds to know fear. They are animate only with hate
and the lust to kill. Now indeed such an enemy is the worst of all, for only
by destruction can they be defeated, only by complete and utter obliteration.
Against thinking beings like us, against all the armies our world could
muster against them, the Future Men would be invincible. Seeing that our
weapons were powerless against them, seeing that our defences were powerless
against theirs, panic would turn our blood to water, our strength to
weakness, and we would be undone. But these imbecile monsters that attack
them—"

"Haven't sense enough to know when they're licked. By all that's holy,
Francois, the Doctils may have beaten themselves." I was recalling how they'd
deliberately destroyed the minds of this planet's natives, had deliberately
made them the idiot things they were. "But go on. Is that battle still
on?"

"Yes—and no. The Veil is whole again, and no drina has achieved the
Bowl. The Plebos, it seems, were able only to obey instructions. They had
been directed to delay the gray-purple hosts with the stratcars 'til the
tower was finished and then to destroy them with the white light from the
tower. This they did, but when the combat raged too evenly for comfort, they
summoned the Kintat. With the advent of the Doctils a new phase of the fight
set in. I saw a great scurrying about. I saw Plebos swarm up the tower
bearing new devices. And then the light that seethed from it was no longer
white. Crackling streamers of blue and scarlet and eye-searing yellow flashed
overhead, seeking the rents in the Veil. The flesh of the attackers no longer
melted but whiffed into nothingness. The breaches in the shimmering barrier
were repaired, and the blaze at the tower-top sputtered out."

The excitement that had made me forget my despair drained out of me, "Then
the Doctils have won. Why did you let me think-?"

"They have not altogether conquered, my friend. The Veil of Ishlak is
whole again, and in the Bowl they are safe, but against the Veil still
billows the gray-purple mass of the drina, and beyond the Veil the Future Men
dare not venture. They are prisoners in Adalon, our captors, 'til they devise
some means to destroy their besiegers."

"We mustn't let them do that." My fingers dug into the poet's scrawny arm.
"We've got to find a way to keep them from doing that, Villon. We've got to
find a way to let the drina get through the Veil and come down into the
Bowl—"

"John!" He pulled back from me, his widened eyes on mine. "Have you gone
mad? Do you not realize that if the drina gain Adalon we too, all of us, will
die with the Plebos and the Doctils? Those loathsome masses will roll over
us, my friend, and we will be taken up within them, and their acids will rot
us—"

"Let them. So long as the Future Men are wiped out, let the drina wipe us
out too. All of us."

"All, John?" Francois' gaze probed my brain. "Even Evelyn, John?"

An icy shudder ran through me. "Even Evelyn, Francois, if I cannot kill
her with my own hand before that happens. If she were here, she would tell
you the same."

"No," the poet sighed. "There is no madness in your eves. But why, then-
?"

I told him. I told him, briefly, what we had seen, and what we had learned
the Kintat planned. "You agree with me, Francois?" I asked when I had
finished. "You agree with me that they must be wiped out, even if we have to
be wiped out with them?"

There was no smile on his lips, and his countenance was gray under its
blue stubble. "Aye, John," he answered. "No matter how terrible a death it
be, our death in the bowels of the drina would be a cheap price to pay for
the destruction of these demons."

"I'd set the value of our lives right now, at two dozen for a nickle, and
that's too high if we hang around in here much longer. You say that thing
you've got there is a key to this cell. If it is, let's go. Let's get out of
here... What's the matter?"

Villon was looking at the involved device in his palm, and something like
dismay was in his face.

"It is a key," he said slowly. "And yet it is no key. It passed me,
singly, in through the stone but—will it take two of us out?"

"The only way to find out is to try. Look. When we left the stratcar
hangar through its wall, Daster had his hand on my back. When the plain
rushed past us as we came to Adalon, Kass had his hands on the two of us.
Maybe I ought to be touching you while you try to use that."

"Of a surety you must touch me." Francois' smile was wan. "Thus, if the
magic of this thing avails to carry us into the stone but not through it, we
shall at least be immured with a comrade near to accompany us into
oblivion."

That was what he was afraid of. That the power of the 'key' might
be enough to get us into the rock, yet not sufficient to take both of us all
the way through it. I admit the thought was not exactly pleasant.

"Well," I put my arm around his narrow shoulders, "It will be an
interesting experiment." I could feet the shudder that was running through
him. "Come on." I'd hate to be cursed with your imagination, I thought, aware
that he was picturing himself caught within the rock, entombed there
forever...

I have a pretty good imagination too.

"Come on, old man," I urged. "Let's get it over with," and pressed him
toward the wall through which he'd come.

A muscle twitched in his sallow cheek. He lifted his hand, placed the
'key' against the bluish, perdurable rock. "It was done thus," he murmured,
"as I watched. And then, the Plebo pressed—this." His thumb moved.

There was no change in the appearance of the wall. "Damn!" I muttered. "It
doesn't work." I struck the stone with my free hand—and my fist went
into it! I stepped forward, pressed Villon with me.

The world blanked out. I felt nothing, saw nothing but featureless
grayness. I seemed to be still moving forward, but the grayness pressed in on
me, held me. I gasped voicelessly. Then, after one fearful instant, the
grayness was gone, and I was in a dim corridor and Francois was beside me.
The floor of the hall pitched steeply down, curving to the left, ran steeply
up, curving to the right, but just here it was level.

Neither of us said anything for a long minute. Neither of us could have
said anything if our lives depended on it.

Then, "It's done," I heard Villon say, and he was jaunty again when I
turned to him, his black eyes sparkling with triumph. "We are through."

"Yes," I agreed, "we're through." I wasn't as happy over that as I might
have been. I had spied an unmoving form sprawled at our feet and the skin on
my back was crawling. Alive, a Plebo is not a pretty sight.
Dead—imagine a dead spider big as a man, all eyes, all glazed, fishy
eyes...

Villon was looking at it too. "He died easily," he murmured, "for so
ungainly a creature."

"I don't like leaving him here." I tried to imitate my companion's
nonchalance. "Anyone coming along this passage will at once know something's
gone wrong, and it may mean the loss of precious minutes for us. I wish there
was somewhere we could hide him."

"There is," Francois responded. "Right at hand."

"Where?" I glanced around, puzzled, saw nothing but bare walls.

"In here." The poet laid his palm against the wall we'd just penetrated.
"If they do not find him 'til they come for you, we shall have lost none of
those jewelled minutes of which you speak."

There was no argument as to that, but could it be done? "I suppose one of
us might carry the corpse in," I ventured. "But, I'd rather not take the
chance of your 'key' failing to work."

"Nor I," Villon shrugged. "But perhaps our friend need not be carried in
there. There is strength in those rounded muscles of yours, my old, and I
suspect that whether he goes all the way through or not will not matter to
him."

I got his idea. "All right. We'll try it." I bent and lifted the dead
Plebo while Francois placed the 'key' against the wall. The cadaver was
lighter than I'd expected. Dangling from my grasp, it seemed almost boneless.
"Ready?"

Villon's thumb pressed, and I threw the corpse at the wall. Threw it
through the wall. It went into the blue, solid-seeming stone as though
that stone were merely an opaque fog.

There was no evidence left of the Plebo, out here in the corridor, except
a small, dark stain on its floor.

"I should like to be there," Francois chuckled, "when they discover him in
that cell, and you gone. Will they think, I wonder, that we are masters of a
magic they do not know?"

"They'll know damned well what's happened, and they'll be after us like a
shot. The only reason I can figure out for their not having missed you yet is
that they're so busy with strengthening their defences against the drina. If
we're to accomplish anything we've got to get going."

"You have right," he agreed. "Which way shall we be going, up or
down?"

I wanted to say down. That way would lead out of the House of Sun, would
lead to the House of Earth. They must have taken the others there, back to
the room where humans from all the centuries awaited the dreaded summons.
They must have taken Evelyn there, and Astaris, posing as me. My blood was
hot again with anger and the thought of the Doctil receiving the tenderness
intended for me hammered at my skull. I understood how a man could kill and
have no compunction at killing.

"Which way, my old?" Villon asked again.

"Up!" I answered. "When the Veil opened to let through the stratcar which
Kass summoned, I noticed a flash near the top of this building. The control
for the Veil must be somewhere above, and if we can get to that—"

"We may be able to raise the Veil and let the drina down into the Bowl!"
Villon finished for me. "You are right; up it is."

And so we climbed upward along the steep spiral of that passage, while
with me went the thought of Evelyn and Astaris and what might be, what must
be, passing between them. It doesn't matter, I tried to tell myself. It
doesn't matter at all. Before she discovers that the man to whose caresses
she gives herself is not the Johnny she has loved since childhood, he will be
dead, and she will be dead, and the only living things left in the Bowl of
Adalon will be the mindless creatures they call the drina.

We seemed to have been climbing eternally, the curving of the passage
hiding what was behind us, and what was ahead. "Like the living of life this
is," Villon murmured. "A blind and toilsome mounting whose aim we do not
know. And when the end is attained, we find it to be—nothing."

"There's something at the top of this climb," I growled. "There's got to
be."

The spiral levelled out for a distance of about ten feet. Ahead it started
climbing again—Villon's clutch on my arm brought me to a halt.
"Hearken," he whispered, his long, grimy forefinger stabbing toward the
slope.

I heard what he meant. A faint whisper of movement, far ahead, far above.
Vague sounds brought to us by the resonance of the tunnel.

"Some of them are up there," I murmured. "In the passage, and coming this
way. We've got to go back before they spy us."

There were faint sounds behind us now, behind and below. Our retreat was
cut off.

The poet's laugh was soundless, but in his eyes there were the same
bitterness and the same despair as had been in the laugh with which he'd
greeted the appearance of Kass. "They play with us, my old," he whispered.
"They play with us as a cat with a mouse, or as a certain jailer of Paris
with his prisoners, permitting that they escape from their dungeon only to
attain, after much travail, another more foul and noisome." His poniard slid
from its sheath. "But they shall not take me, alive." The dagger, stained
with the blood of the Plebo he'd killed, flashed to his breast—

I caught his wrist before the point had more than pricked the velvet. "No,
you fool," I grunted. "We're not caught yet. The passage is level here, like
it was outside my cell. That may mean we're at another story of the building
and that behind one of these walls there's a chamber in which we can
hide."

"It may. It well may." His eyes were sparkling again. "And those we hear
coming may be proceeding on their own affairs, not hunting us. But behind
which wall, my old, lies safety?"

"Nothing like finding out. This side's my guess. It's this side the cell
was on. Where's that 'key'? Quick. They're a lot nearer."

I grabbed Villon's arm and his hand went up to the wall I'd indicated. I
was going through the grayness again, but I was getting quite used to that.
What bothered me was whether there was a room on the other side of the wall,
or whether it had become the outside wall of the building so that, once
through, we'd go hurtling down—

We didn't. We came out smoothly, safely, on the other side—I
crouched, forcing Francois down with me, my pulses pounding.

The space into which we had come was low-ceiled but long and wide. It was
bare as the cell from which Villon had rescued me, but it was occupied.

At one end King Arthur and Orth and Louis were seated on the floor, Elijah
erect not far from them. Nearer us Evelyn Rand walked leisurely about.

And strolling beside her was—myself!

"Magic!" Villon gasped. "John is here and he is there, and—" My palm
over his mouth muffled the rest. Too late. Astaris had turned, was looking
straight at us with my eyes, out of my face. But he did not see us. He could
not have seen us, for that turn of his had been slow and leisurely and Evelyn
had turned with him. She had not seen us either for now they were walking
slowly away, hand in hand as a couple of lovers might walk beneath a silver
moon.

"Johnny," I heard Evelyn murmur. "Are you sure it wasn't all something we
dreamed? What we've gone through can't be real, and this too. This garden,
this quiet peace, and you here with me, it's all just as I pictured it,
longingly, all those lonely years."

"Why worry," I heard my own low voice answer from the lips of that other
who was so like me I might be looking in a mirror. "This is real for now,
this loveliness. Don't think of anything else. Think of me. Think of how much
you love me, and of how—" He hesitated.

"Yes, Johnny?"

"And of how I love you." He was looking down at her now, with a curious
eagerness. "Tell me, my very dear, how I love you, and why."

They were only a pace from us now, and yet there was no hint that either
was aware of our presence. I felt Villon quiver, under my restraining
hand.

"Why don't you tell me, Johnny?" They angled, as though turning the
corner of a path where I could see only naked floor. "A girl wants to hear
things like that from her lover." They were walking parallel to the wall
against which we crouched, about a yard from it.

"Does she? I wouldn't know, Eve. I don't know how a lover should speak and
act. Will you teach me?"

"Doesn't your own heart teach you-? Oh look!" She stopped, half turning to
the wall. "Isn't this forsythia lovely?" Her slim hand reached out to empty
air, but her fingers seemed to be touching something that wasn't there. "It's
just like the bush near the gate of our fence where I waited for you, years
ago."

I got it! Jumping Jupiter, I got it! Eve saw a garden, shrubbery, where
there was nothing at all but gray rock. The others—I threw a swift
glance at them and saw Orth's fingers trail along the floor as one trails his
fingers through sod, saw Louis gesture as though he picked up a twig and
threw it from him—were victims of the same illusion. It was just one
more instance of the mass hypnotism, the capture of our weaker minds by those
infinitely more powerful, tremendously better trained, that I had already
experienced more than once. Its purpose, this time, was clear.

Astaris had arranged a romantic setting for his laboratory experiment in
romance.

Villon and I were not affected by the illusion because the Doctil did not
know of our presence. And this implied that he also saw this bare space as, a
lovely garden, that to him also there appeared to be shrubbery here where we
crouched, forsythia bushes that concealed us.

Could this be because he was himself the real subject of the experiment
and so deliberately was exposing himself to its conditions, or because,
assuming my eyes, my brain, he had also assumed my susceptibility to the mass
hypnosis? It didn't matter. What mattered was that we were hidden from him by
those illusory bushes.

"Don't move," I muttered in Francois' ear. "Don't make a sound." And then
I was stealing away from him, crouched low, was creeping stealthily toward
Evelyn and her companion, their backs still toward me.

I had to guess how far the invisible shrubbery extended. I had to take the
chance that my very real body would not rustle those unreal leaves. All I
could do was to make no sound on the corporeal rock across which I stole.

I got within a yard of the two and sprang. My fist flailed, pounded the
jointure of spine and brain-case where a blow is certain to stun a man. My
victim thudded soggily to the floor.

Evelyn whirled, screaming. Her scream cut off, and only a gasp came from
her throat. There was no color in her face, her lips. Her pupils were
dilated.

A strangled shout came from behind me. "The garden—where?" There was
the trample of feet running toward us. There was Arthur's bellow, "Ho,
varlet—"

"John!" the latter exclaimed. "John March. Thou art he indeed. But then
who-?"

"Astaris," I told him. "One of the Doctils. He took my shape. He made you
think he was I."

The king pulled the edge of his hand across his eyes, his face ghastly.
"Magicked again. A moment ago we were stretched on greensward, besides a
purling stream. Now—these walls, this footing and ceil of bare
stone—"

"Wait." It was Orth who had grabbed me, and he had not let me go. "How do
we know this one is March and not—" He cut off. He was gaping down at
the floor and a green pallor spread across his blunt jawed countenance. "Ach
Gott!"

I twisted as far as his hold on me would permit, looked to see what had
affected him so. It wasn't my double that lay unconscious at Evelyn's feet.
It was Achronos Astaris in his proper shape; tentacular limbs, bulbous small
body clothed in its orange integument, enormous head, all complete. The huge
eyes were sightless, staring.

"Now you know which one of us is the real John March," I grated, jerking
free from the Archduke's clutch. "Get him tied up, with your belts, with
everything you've got that can be made into ropes, before he comes to."

"He must not be permitted to come to, John," Villon's quiet voice said.
"Tie him as we may, we cannot prevent him from sending a mental message to
his fellows." The poet dropped to his knees beside Astaris, and his poniard
was in his fingers.

"No!" I cried. "No, Francois!" He looked up at me, his shaggy brows
quizzical, his twisted smile mocking. "Oh, I haven't any feeling for him, but
we thought Arthur's idea of holding him as a hostage was a good one, and it
still may be. We'll tie him up, and we'll keep him stunned. We'll watch him
every minute, and the instant he shows signs of regaining consciousness,
we'll conk him again."

"He is right, Villon," Orth supported me. "It may do us some good or not,
but to keep him alive yet awhile cannot do harm."

The Frenchman shrugged. "Perhaps. Yet I would fear him less if he were
dead."

"We approve of our John's advice," Arthur put an end to the discussion.
"The creature shall be bound, and we, in our own proper person, shall make it
our charge that he remains asleep."

I left the others to tie up the Doctil, got to the girl's side. "Eve!" She
was rigid, her tiny face still and pallid.

"What's wrong?" My arm was around her, I was drawing her close to me.

Her mouth twisted. "I—I kissed him, Johnny. I gave my kiss to
that—Thing."

"It was I you gave that kiss to, darling," I murmured. "You thought it was
I you were giving it to, and that makes it all right. Or it will, as soon as
you correct the misdelivery."

It seemed to. At any rate the tenseness went out of her, and she was very
sweet, very warm, in my arms.

We were reminded that we were not alone in some ecstatic solitude by
Louis' boyishly plaintive voice. "I wish someone would tell me where the
garden went to. I liked it. It was the first time I'd viewed grass and
flowers since I was a very little boy."

"Oh, you poor kid," Evelyn exclaimed. Pulling free of me, she ran to him,
put her arm around him. "You poor, poor child. They put you in prison when
you were only nine years old, didn't they?"

"The garden wasn't real, Louis," I told him. "Astaris made you all 'see'
it, and when I knocked him out he couldn't make you see it any longer."

"There will be no gardens anywhere, John," Villon drawled, "if we spend
our time on kisses and prattle. Have you forgotten the mission on which we
set out?"

"What mission?" Orth demanded. I told them about the drina'sattack,
about our plan to attempt to lift the Veil of Ishlak and let them into the
Bowl. "There is no doubt in my mind that if the creatures are powerful enough
to keep the Veil from closing, they will be able to tear down every building
in Adalon," I ended. "And so there will be no safety from them for anyone in
Adalon, for Plebos or Doctils—or us. Villon and I made the decision for
you, my friends, when you were not there to ask, because we felt that is how
you would want it. Were we right?"

Elijah was the first to answer me. "Gladly would I embrace the Angel of
Death, knew I that in the same dark flight he would bear off those heathen
who have denied their Creator and would destroy His work." Looking about at
the faces of the others, I read confirmation in their grave lineaments, their
level gaze. I sought Evelyn's.

"I could not love you," she said, simply, "if I thought you would consider
saving my life at the cost of letting them carry out their dreadful plan. I
am not afraid to die, Johnny, now that I have been in your arms."

"All right," I said, crisply to hide the emotion that was tearing at my
throat. "We'll go ahead with it then, if we can. But I'd give a lot to know
what's going on out there. If they've already driven the drina away, or
destroyed them, there would be no use in our trying to find the place from
which the Veil is controlled. But as it's impossible for us to find that out,
I—"

"Monsieur Marsh!" Louis interrupted. "I think that perhaps you can
do that. When first we were left alone in this garden I saw you—this
Doctil who pretended to be you—gazing into something that appeared like
a mirror, thinking himself unobserved. I wondered then what he saw in it that
made him look afraid and angry, both at once. Maybe this thing he looked into
was no mirror at all, but—"

"Some device similar to television," I finished for him. "In taking my
form he seems to have lost a great many of his mental powers, and he'd want
to keep in touch-. If we can find it—" I turned to Astaris' bound form,
and saw that Villon was already kneeling to it, his long, deft fingers
searching it.

"This that he wears is skin-tight as the costumes of the tumblers who
amuse the rabble on Seine's bank of a feastday," the poet reported. "It gives
no space for the concealment—Ah!" he broke off. His hand came out from
under the body it was searching, and there was a gleaming plate in it,
circular and about the size of a woman's hand glass. "It lay beneath him.
Your clothing, on him, was an illusion, but this is real."

"I hope the fall hasn't put it out of commission." I reached for it. "Let
me see." He gave it to me.

The thing looked very much like the toilet article to which I've compared
it, except that it had no handle. It was somewhat thicker too, and the edge
of the disk was serried with tiny protuberances. The mirror itself was oddly
milky, so that in it the reflections, of my face and of Evelyn and the others
crowding about me to peer into it, were vague and wraithlike.

"Post thou see aught?" King Arthur demanded, glanced at him. He was
watching the recumbent Doctil, his scabbarded sword held clublike in his big
hands. He wasn't allowing curiosity to distract him from his self-delegated
task of keeping our hostage unconscious and innocuous. "What dost thou
see?"

The misty reflections vanished from the glass. It was clear, abruptly, and
glowing. But it showed only a meaningless jumble; broken shapes of stone,
corners, canted walls, a disjointed tentacle, a single great eye, the
confused pieces of a jig-saw puzzle or a surrealist's nightmare. "Damn!" I
grunted. "It's television all right. But I can't make head or
tail—"

"He held it like this." The Dauphin grabbed the rim of the disk, tugged at
it 'til I was holding it vertically. The chaos slid beneath its surface as it
moved, and changed kaleidoscopically, but it was still a chaos.

"Oh," Eve stamped her foot. "It's exasperating."

"Wait!" I grunted. "I'm like a kid with a toy piano, banging all the keys
at once." I let all save one of the buttons come up. "That does it!"

Etched crystal-clear in the mirror was the corridor where Villon and I
almost had been caught. "The buttons control the distance the thing sees, and
by pressing all of them I was superimposing layer after layer of this
building upon one another, like a dozen transparent pictures." A Plebo went
by in the glass descending, some peculiarly shaped instrument in his hand.
Another followed him. "They're still looking for Francois and me."

"I doubt that," Orth disputed me. "These people better ways of finding you
will have than running around like chickens with the heads chopped off. For
example, they must have more than one of these glasses and with them in
minutes they could scan the whole of Adalon."

"He has right, John," Francois agreed. "Me, I think they hasten to the
defence of their city. Perchance the drina once more have pierced the
Veil."

"We'll soon see. Which way was Astaris facing this when you saw him use
it, Louis?"

The youngster showed me, and then, as I pressed buttons in rotation, room
after room of the House of Sun appeared in the mirror and flicked off. I
should have liked to examine each but it was more important to determine what
the situation was outside.

The last button brought a vista of the Bowl of Adalon into the round
glass.

The aspect of its level floor had not changed much from when we'd crossed
it, shepherded by Daster, except that the girders no longer flowed across it
to the tower, and that the tower was finished. A number of Plebos were
clustered around its base and Favril and Bolar were among them, but it was up
the lacy spire that my eyes lifted—to where its apex, level with the
rim of the bowl, was surmounted by a wide platform that held a knot of Plebos
and Daster and several machines whose nature I could not make out.

The occupants of the platform were looking outward and there was something
in their posture that told me that they were afraid. I canted the small glass
to bring what they gazed at into its circle, and I saw.

I saw the brink of the cliff and the grayish purple cloud that mounded
monstrously there, more menacing than any thunderhead. It was not storm with
which that cloud was pregnant but hate and the lust to kill and the vilest of
deaths. It was not cloud. It was a massing of a myriad pulsing bodies merged
by their own weight, their own avid pressure into one, and it was restrained
only by the shimmer of force Villon had called the Veil of Ishlak from
pouring down upon Adalon.

And in Adalon the men of the future watched the dark and mindless death
brooding over their city and were afraid. If the veil should yield to its
awful thrust they would perish horribly—and we with them.

But Earth, the Earth of the Twentieth Century, would be saved. Somehow I
must find a way to make the Veil yield.

As these thoughts flashed through my mind, John Orth groaned. "Mother of
all Living. This is horror—"

"That's it!" I exclaimed. "That may be the answer." An idea that may have
lain beneath the surface of my mind all this time had broken through.
"Maybe," I said trembling with sudden hope, "maybe we don't have to die after
all, my friends. Maybe we can save Earth from the Doctils without
that."

"What?—How?—Johnny, what do you mean?..." A
tumult of
questions beat at me, but I paid them no attention as I feverishly thumbed
the button of the television disk that I'd first pressed, at the same time
moving the device to focus again the corridor just outside this chamber.

The plan that had sprung into my mind was breathtaking in its simplicity,
but there were many things I had to know before I could even attempt carrying
it out. The level part of the passage was now empty of life. I moved the disk
so as to follow the descending spiral and catch up with the last of the
hurrying Plebos I'd glimpsed. The thing he carried was, in the same manner
that a revolver is a miniature cannon, a miniature of one of the machines on
the towertop.

"Yes," I muttered, "that must be it. They've been called together to guard
something or someone tremendously important. Pray, Elijah. If you have any
influence with your God, pray that it's in this building."

"Look here, March," Orth insisted. "We've got a right to know what you're
up to." The Plebo I watched reached another of the level places in the ramp,
halted, and turned to the blank wall. "What are you looking for?"

"You named it yourself, Orth. You handed it to me on a silver
platter."

"I named it!" The Plebo melted into the wall and I manipulated buttons to
follow him. "What did I name, John Marsh?"

The room that came into the disk was walled with silver and it was as
large as the one we were in. Ten Plebos, each armed with a weapon such as the
newcomer carried, stood in a circle and at its center on a raised dais the
Doctil Gohret stood above a case of some transparent substance within which,
couched on billows of white, softly gleaming silk lay—"Marsh!" Orth was
insisting. "What was it I named?"

"The Mother of All Living," I answered him softly. "Look at her. The
mother-to-be of all the living whom the Doctils intend shall inherit our own
good green Earth when they have conquered it."

Within that case she was larger by far than any woman any of us have ever
known, but she was formed like the women we knew and not like the grotesque
beings of the Future who guarded her. Her skin was as white as the cushioned
silk on which she lay nude, her eyes closed, and more lustrous. She was
great- bosomed, huge-limbed, immensely wide of hip. Her face was possessed of
pale, almost unearthly beauty but it was a bovine beauty, a mindless calm
that made of her something less than human.

"The Matra," I breathed. "The Queen Bee. The spawner of ova for the
Doctils and the only one of her kind left alive. From her they must get the
seed of the superhumans of whom they dream, and without her their dream
cannot be fulfilled. Without her they will be five Doctils and a hundred
Plebos, and never any more. Without her there would be no point in their
depopulating Earth of our race and our generation, for without her they could
never repeople it again with theirs.

"That is why they guard her, and Gohret. If only one Doctil is left alive
with her, he can recreate his race. If all of them escape the drina, but she
dies, they are beaten."

"And so," Villon was the first to comprehend, "we must slay her."

"No, Johnny!" There was horror in Eve's cry. "She is a woman, a mother. It
would be an unspeakable crime."

I twisted to her. "A crime, Eve, and unspeakable—but not mine. They
are guilty of it who degraded womanhood to the level of a breeding machine.
You call that Matra a mother, but is she? It takes love to make a mother, and
years of fostering care. That poor creature will never know her offspring,
never even see them. She is no more a mother than a hen whose eggs are taken
from her as soon as they are laid and placed in an incubator to batch. And,
Eve, million's upon millions of real mothers on the Earth of our time will
die, as horribly as you saw the mothers of this planet die—if the Matra
lives. If she lives they will die, and the children whom they have
borne in suffering, and fed at their breasts, and agonised over, will die. It
is the Matra's life against the lives of those mothers, one against
millions."

I was justifying my proposal not only to her but to myself. It ran counter
to all the tradition bred into me, to all I had been taught. I recalled with
what horror I'd watched, in the twentieth century I was fighting to protect,
bombs rain from the sky upon women, mothers—

"The Matra is not even a woman, Fraulein Evelyn," Orth put in. "Look how
in that so beautiful face there is no hint of a soul, no semblance of
thought. Were she a woman, did she know what she is and what is done with
her, she would embrace death as a mercy and a blessed release."

"She—she is asleep," Evelyn objected, weakly. "Maybe if she were
awake—"

"That isn't sleep, darling," I interrupted. "Look. That case is
hermetically sealed. There is no way for air to get into it, let alone food.
She is in a state of suspended animation, a sort of living death. She is to
all intents, already dead. It is only a very tiny spark of life that would be
extinguished if she were killed."

The girl made a little, halting gesture with her hand. "You are right,
Johnny, and I am wrong." And then she smiled tremulously and put her hand on
my arm. "But look. If you can take her away from them and not kill her,
they'd give anything to get her back. Promise me you won't kill her unless
you have to. Please, Johnny, promise me that."

I would have promised her the world with a fence around it right then. "I
promise, Eve."

The fluttering touch of her fingertips on my cheek was thanks enough.

"You promise much, John, and talk much about seizing the Matra or slaying
her," Francois said softly. "But of how it is to be done you say nothing. Is
it that you will enter that room, bow, and say prettily, 'Messieurs, I have
come to slay her whom you guard, armed with weapons against which I have no
means of attack. Pray stand while I slice her gullet."

He was right. I looked again into the disk, saw again the quiet, confident
circle of Plebos around that gleaming casket, saw the orange-torsoed Gohret
beside it, one splayed hand resting on its top. Of all the Kintat this one
was the most implacable, the most nearly naked intelligence, the most
formidable. What strength did we have, what strategy could we evolve, that
could have any hope of success against him?

"Have faith in the Eternal, my son," Elijah intoned.

"The Most Holy arms the righteous with the lightnings of His wrath.
Jehovah casts the cloak of His omnipotence about them who go forth to battle
against His enemies."

"I fear me, sage," Villon's slurred accents took issue with him, "that
your Jehovah has forsaken this land and all who people it. I seem to recall
that its inhabitants were in the very act of worshipping Him, or Someone very
like Him, when disaster fell upon them."

"Silence!" Arthur ordered. "We will not have this squabbling while our
John March meditates upon the means to defeat the heathen."

And Louis was piping, "You'll win over them, Monsieur March. You
will, I'm sure of it."

Whether I wished it or not, I had assumed the leadership of the little
band. I had to justify their faith in me. I simply had to. "I'll work out
some way of getting at the Matra," I told them, pretending a confidence I
didn't feel. "But we ought to have two strings to our bow. Suppose we see
what chance there is of our carrying out our original idea, to lift the Veil
of Ishlak and let the drina down into the Bowl."

I moved the disk, pressed the proper button. The scene outside flashed
into the glass once more—the strange structures that were arranged as
the planets of the Solar System are arranged, the defending tower with its
cluster of Future Men about its base and on the platform at its top. Their
tenseness, the slow throb of their ear- membranes, filled with a brooding
fear the Bowl of Adalon.

The gray-purple mass of the drina pressed against the Veil, waiting.
They'd wait there 'til the end of time if need be. Hate would keep them
there, the hate that was the last remnant of mentality the conquerors of
their world had left them. The lust to kill would keep them there, the blind
lust to destroy that the maddening vibrations of those conquerors' sonic
vibrators had instilled in them, a grisly exchange for the souls of which
they had been robbed.

There seemed in this latter circumstance a twisted justice, a grotesque
sort of retribution.

My throat tightened. One of those who crowded around me to look into the
disk may have jolted my arm, or perhaps some obscure impulse had made me tip
it a little, so that I was looking over the cloud of the drina and beyond
it.

At any rate, silhouetted against the low brown sky, I saw something that
had not been there before, that could not, I swear, before this have been
seen from within the Bowl. Black, and so vast as to blot out a full quadrant
of the sky in which it hung, I saw the statue that was my first memory of the
Land Where Time is Not. The haunched body, the soaring legs, the hooded,
awful head of a Being that was neither man nor beast.

Or was it the statue? Immense as it was, it seemed to have a quality of
life that the great monument had not possessed. Was this because it was a
mirage? Or was it? Reason rejected the other hypothesis. And yet—and
yet, the tremendous apparition was not quite the same as the monument that
had so astounded me. Its hood seemed lifted a little. The eyes still hidden
with that hood seemed to be gazing down on the hosts of the drina. And
something in the poise of that vast head, in the very lines of that monstrous
body, seemed to speak of pity, and sorrow, and also of a patience that was
reaching its end.

The others saw it too, they must have seen it. For I heard Elijah's
rolling, orotund tones, answering Villon. "Oh little man of little faith. The
Eternal is infinite and all-present. Nor in the uttermost reaches of the
Firmament, nor in the ultimate end of Time, is there limit to Him, nor let to
His majesty. For His own inscrutable purpose He may permit His faithful to
suffer, but never, in the end, does He forsake them."

And for once Francois Villon had no mocking reply at the tip of his
tongue.

The presence in the brown sky faded and was gone. It must
after all, I
told myself, have been a mirage. But I was not quite able to rid myself of a
certain awe. I had seen Something few men have been privileged to see through
all the ages, and the despair, the empty feeling of helplessness that had
weighed me down, curiously was lessened.

I returned to a scrutiny of the tower. I counted the Plebos under Daster's
command on the high platform. Twenty-six. It was more difficult to count
those below, but I saw there were certainly in the near neighborhood of
fifty. Ten were with Gohret, guarding the Matra and one was dead. Originally,
I recalled, there had been a hundred.

That left only a handful unaccounted for, not more than fifteen certainly.
Where were these?

Blurred movement at the edge of the disk seemed to offer an answer. I
shifted it to bring the movement near its center—

"Good Lord!" I exclaimed. "Look at that."

The movement I'd glimpsed was at the entrance aperture to the House of
Earth. There were coming out of it no Plebos, but the giant Norseman, light
glinting from his winged metal casque, and the blonde Briton. Streaming after
them came the Roman in his toga, the vividly garmented Egyptian, the Mongol
Lieutenant of Genghis Khan, all the humans who'd congregated in the room from
which Daster had called me and my companions.

They started running, toward the Future Men at the base of the tower!
Something flashed through the air ahead of them and a Plebo on the fringe of
the cluster nearest them toppled, an arrow quivering in the back of his
enormous head. The Redskin who'd dispatched that arrow fitted another to his
bow. The bare, muscular arm of a patrician- featured Greek swept back to
launch a javelin.

"They're attacking!" Evelyn cried. "They're charging the Future Men!"

"If they capture and destroy the tower..."

The Viking came on in great bounds, swinging a two-handed sword broader
even than Excalibur. The Roman's, close beside him, was a short blade little
longer than a knife. The Greek's javelin arced over their heads, found its
mark in another Plebo's eye—

Passed right through and left the Plebo, standing, unaffected!

"Damn!" I grunted. "Now that the Future Men know they're coming those
things can do no more harm to them than Orth's bullet to Daster."

The Indian's second arrow swept harmlessly through the defenders of the
tower. A stone axe hurled by a pelt-clothed Pict might have been thrown at
shadows, for all the effect it had. The Plebos were facing the charge, their
weapons in their hands now, weapons like those with which the ones guarding
the Matra were armed. The very calmness with which they awaited the attack
gave proof of how little they feared it. But the Norseman came on, waving his
sword, his walrus mustaches drooped on either side of a mouth wide open to
vent a bellow of defiance I could not hear. The attacking column rushed
toward the menace of the Plebos' mysterious weapons and not one of the motley
assortment that composed it hestitated or turned to flee.

"They are fools," I heard Villon voice what was in my mind. "But what
magnificent fools!"

Or were they? The Plebos held their fire and the Viking, still foremost,
was within ten yards of them. Did the charging men have a chance? If they
had, if they captured the tower—The wing-helmeted head vanished from
the Norseman's shoulders! The Roman's sword arm was sheared off clean at the
joint and his abruptly legless torso thudded down, quiveringly, horribly
still alive. The Egyptian was sliced in half, a slashed fragment of the
Indian skidded across the plaza...

It was over. There had been no flashes from the Plebos' weapons. There had
been no evidence that they'd done any thing but stand there and wait for the
charge to reach them, yet there no longer was any charge. Nothing was left of
those who'd attacked with such magnificent courage save scarcely recognizable
fragments of human bodies scattered over the rocky plain.

There was no blood. It seemed especially horrible that they did not
bleed.

"Amen," I whispered, and I heard a whispered amen from Orth and Louis,
from Arthur and Evelyn. None of us could possibly have spoken above a
whisper, for a long moment.

The throbbing silence was broken by Villon. "And that, my friend," he was
not smiling, "is what awaits us in the chamber where the Matra lies."

"Nevertheless, poet," I growled, "I'm going to have a try at making our
friends of the future pay for what they've just done out there."

"You were going to find the controls for the Veil," Evelyn's soft voice
reminded me.

That brought me back a little to myself. I blotted out the scene outside
the House of Sun, drew the probing rays of the television disk within it,
started scanning its every nook and cranny.

It was a vast labyrinth of passages, a warren of rooms large and small.
Some of the rooms were empty, some piled to the ceiling with all kinds of
things that I should like to have examined more closely. I went on and on,
grimly searching for the vulnerable heart of Adalon's defences.

I had begun at the lowermost level of the immense structure, and now my
search had reached the base of the dome that surmounted it, and as yet I had
not found that for which I hunted.

The great stratcar hangar came into the disk. Only one of the silvery
fliers remained there; all the rest, I guessed, had gone out to fight the
drina and had been wrecked. I tried to recall how many there had been. About
a dozen. Each of the missing ones must have been ridden by at least one
Plebo. There still were four or five to be located. They must be
somewhere.

The disk moved slowly in my hand. It was grayed by the momentary blankness
I had learned meant that the beam, or whatever it was that scanned the
distant scenes, was passing through a wall. The grayness cleared and I was
looking at a vaulted room fully as large as that where the stratcars had
been.

This, however, was not like the hangar, hollow and empty. It was packed
with a maze of gleaming metal, of glowing tubes and looped cables, the whole
vibrating so that I could almost hear the hum of leashed energy.

"This is it," I said hoarsely. "This is their powerhouse."

Here, for the first time anywhere in the House of Sun except the room
where the Matra slept, I found life. A single Plebo paced around the
intricacy, his enormous eyes intent upon it.

"One," Villon murmured. "There is only one." From the corner of my eye I
saw that he fingered the hilt of his poniard. "Wait," I said. "Wait,
Villon."

At one end of the plexus of polished steel and copper the cables joined
and formed a huge coil, something like the intricate induction coils of a
radio except that this was perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. No conductor
left it. All the energy that was being created here was being fed into this,
and apparently remained there.

That was queer, I thought, then recalled what Daster had told me of the
manner in which the Future Men used their own brains as electrical machines.
It dawned on me that they mentally tapped this reservoir of power and
directed it to where it was needed.

That was that. I could not get at the controls of the Veil of Ishlak
because those controls were the minds of the Doctils themselves. Wait! I did
not have to worry about the controls! The energy that formed the Veil
originated in that room and if we could reach it, if we could destroy the
prime power-source it housed, the Veil would collapse.

The Veil would collapse and the drina would pour down into Adalon. They
would surge over the Doctils and over the Plebos.

And over us. Over Evelyn.

I recalled what I had seen on the entrance plain. I recalled the linked
armor that still held the empty shape of a man. Not even that much would be
left of the honey-haired girl, the gray-eyed girl whose lips I had tasted and
found sweet.

There was that other room. The room where Gohret and his Plebos watched
over the Matra.

I had just seen what folly the thought of a frontal attack on them was. To
think of reaching the Matra by stealth was as futile. Her case was in the
chamber's very center, the unbroken circle of Plebos around it and Gohret
beside it. Only an Adalonian could even enter that room in safety. Now if
only I could assume Astaris' shape as easily as he had mine—

I turned to her, drinking in that slender body of hers, etching on my
memory its delicate curves, the translucent oval of her face. I had come to a
decision and I had only a few moments more to capture an image of her to take
with me into oblivion.

"Johnny." Her hand was in mine. "Why don't you answer me? You've figured
out something. Why don't you tell us what it is?"

"Yes, dear. I've figured out a way of getting at the Matra that has a one-
in-a-million chance of coming off. But before I talk about that, I want to
arrange for the second string to our bow, the lifting of the Veil. I'm sure
that can be done."

The others were looking at me now, their eyes questioning.

"Francois," I said. "You were watching the disk as closely as I was. Do
you think that you can find the room where the great machine is?"

"Of a surety, my cabbage. That is very simple for one who could travel the
roofs of the Faubourg St. Germaine on nights when even the squawling cats
were blind, and in all that myriad of windows find the one behind which slept
the maiden to whom his current fancy drew him."

"Fine. Because I want you to lead them there, Elijah and Orth and Louis,
and Evelyn. Arthur too, carrying Astaris with him. When you get near it, you
will leave the others and sneak into that place and use your poniard on the
Plebo in there."

A crooked grin crossed the Frenchman's face. "Understood, my carrot."

"When you've disposed of him, call in the others. And wait."

"Wait? For what?"

"You'll know. Because I'm going to give you this television disk to take
along—here Louis, you'd better carry it—and in it you will watch
the room of the Matra. What you see happen there will tell you, Arthur," I
turned to him and Orth, "whether to smash the lights you will see glowing
here and there about the machine in that room."

"To smash lights." Arthur's brows gathered in puzzlement. "And why should
you set us to smashing lights, John March?"

"If you are discovered," I ignored his question for the moment, "don't
stop to fight but smash those lights. Because," now I answered the king,
"when they are smashed the power will be shut off from the Veil of Ishlak and
there no longer will be a Veil to hold back the drina and so there will be no
point in fighting.

"Orth," I continued, trying not to see the effect of that on them, "give
me your gun. Francois, after we are out in the corridor I shall want the
thing you took from the Plebo you killed, the 'key' as you call it."

"I'm going to try to get to the room of the Matra, darling, and I'm going
to try to kill her. The chances are a million to one against my succeeding,
but if I do succeed, in time, you will have a chance to live."

"And you?"

"Oh," I shrugged, "I'll make out all right." And quickly, so that she
should not read in my eyes that I lied, that whether I killed the Matra or
not I would surely die, I turned to the Dauphin. "Louis. It will be your job
to act as lookout to warn the others of the approach of any Plebos or
Doctils. And, my boy, if and when it becomes necessary for the lights to be
smashed, to warn them of the approach of the drina."

Now I was almost finished. I had only one more instruction to give.
"Francois. A word in private with you, if the others will not mind."

We stepped aside and I murmured what I had to say in his ear. He heard it,
and blinked at me, and then I thought he stood a little more erect, a little
more proudly than before. "John," he murmured. "John Marsh. I have received
the accolades of counts and dukes, of a king and a Pope but never, in my
misspent life have I been honored as thus at its end you honor me."

What I had told him was that if it came to it that Louis warned of the
drina's approach, he was gently, very gently, to slip his poniard into
Evelyn's heart.

A soft thud swung me to King Arthur. His sheathed sword was
lifting from
Astaris' enormous head.

"The varlet stirred," the king explained, "and we had to quiet him."

I stared down at the Doctil, grotesque, malignant even lying there bound
and unconscious. If in that instant of dawning awareness, he'd sent out even
one syllable of a cry for help, my million to one chance of getting to the
Matra and gaining for Evelyn a slim hope of survival was gone.

There was no way of telling whether he had sent out that appeal.

Villon's arm was across my shoulder. "John," his low voice murmured.
"Indeed there is peril for all of us, but for the task of greatest peril you
have appointed yourself. You are young. You have the love of that sweet
maiden to live for. For me, even were I to return to my land and my epoch,
there is nothing left but a dreary exile, poverty, the haunted skulking of an
outcast. Let me take your place, and you mine."

"Thank you, Francois," I answered. "But it isn't any melodramatic heroism
that motivates me. If what I'm going to try to do can be done at all, only I
can do it. I'm the only one who possibly can hope to get near the Matra.
We're wasting time. Let's get started."

I was sure that the 'key' would take two at a time through the wall, and I
didn't want to risk experimenting with more. Our exodus to the corridor,
therefore, took longer than I liked, Villon ferrying us through one by one. I
went first, to stand on guard with Orth's gun, and each time Francois
vanished into the stone, I wondered whether before he returned I should see a
squad of Plebos hurrying toward us, through simple bad luck or brought by
some call from our prisoner. My palms were wet with cold sweat by the time
Arthur appeared with the stunned Doctil across his shoulder so for the sake
of doing something I took the 'key' from him myself and went back to bring
Francois out.

I dropped it into my vest pocket when we were in the corridor again, and
saluted the men. They moved away, rounded the curve of the corridor where it
lifted upward to continue its long spiral, passed from sight. I was alone
with Evelyn for the last time.

I dared take only a minute for our parting, dared not trust myself to
speak. Nor was it with words that she told me that my love for her was no
greater than hers for me.

Then Evelyn Rand was going away from me, to join the others who were
waiting for her, and I was really alone. Forever. I turned, started down the
long, winding incline towards where, as surely as though I myself had drawn
the plans of the House of Sun, I knew I would find the cell of the Matra and
those who waited with death in their hands for any enemy who might try to
approach her.

I wasn't afraid of what lay ahead. One is no longer afraid when one knows
that death is imminent and inevitable.

I went over what I contemplated. I would have to rehearse my every act, my
every movement so that they would follow one another precisely, mechanically.
If I had to think, even for an instant, I would fail. That was —

She slipped her fingers into the crook of my elbow. "You didn't think I
would let you go alone, Johnny," she smiled. "You didn't really think I would
let you die, without me at your side to die with you." There was a glint of
mischief in her eyes, a mischievous twist at the corners of her mouth. "I
waited 'til I was sure you had gone too far to send me back, and then I came
after you."

"You little fool. You dear little fool. You'll ruin every—" I
checked. Her being with me wouldn't ruin my plan. It might even help it.

"What are we going to do, Johnny?" she asked. "What's' your plan?"

I had to tell her. I had to be sure that she understood it in every
detail. "It's very simple, my dear. I'm going to pretend to be Astaris."

"Astaris! But you can't make yourself look like him."

"I don't have to. He made himself look like me. Gohret knows that, doesn't
know he's changed back. He doesn't know that I've got hold of one of the
instruments that enable the Plebos to go through the walls. When I come
through the wall into that room, he'll be almost certain, in the first
instant, to think I'm Astaris."

"In the first instant. But he can read our thoughts, Johnny. He'll read
yours, and since you know that you're really John March he'll know it too, at
once."

"That's the weakest point of my scheme. But I think can get past it."

"How?"

"By being Astaris. By convincing myself that I am Astaris, as a
great actor convinces himself that he is the character he portrays; so that
every unconscious gesture of his is that character's and not his own. I'm no
actor, the Lord knows, but now I have to be one and I will."

"I know you will, Johnny." Her quiet trust in me gave me renewed
confidence. "I know you will. But, Astaris, why should you keep your disguise
as March when you're going to Gohret?"

"Whoa up, Eve. You don't know that I'm Astaris. You still think I'm John
March. You've asked a question that was bothering me 'til you showed up but
now it's answered. Here's the story. I assumed John March's personality, his
whole make-up, in the hope that your love would evoke a corresponding emotion
in me. You see, I can't conceive that it is anything but a physical or
chemical reaction, requiring only a duplication of conditions to come about.
Well, I've succeeded. I've learned the nature of love. Under normal
conditions I would bring you before the whole Kintat to confirm it, but
because the others are occupied with the defense against the drina, I'm
taking you to Gohret alone.

"If I changed back to my real form, you would be terrified, and the
experiment ruined. I might even lose the effect it has had on me. That's why
I'm still posing as John March. Do you understand?"

Her brow wrinkled, adorably. "It's a little complicated. You're Astaris,
and you want Gohret to know that, but you want me to think that you're my
Johnny."

"Exactly. I'm posing as Astaris posing as me. I am Astaris posing as John
March. Your part is easy. You know I'm John March, and you're very much in
love with me. You don't understand what I'm up to but you trust me
implicitly."

"In other words I just have to be myself."

"Exactly. You can even be as scared as you please of Gohret and the
Plebos. You only have to be careful to remember to forget what happened in
that garden back there."

"You mean when you—"

"Hold it, darling. I kissed you in the garden, and we were very happy with
our love, so that you almost forgot all the strange things that had been
happening until then. I asked you to come somewhere with me, and you answered
that you would go anywhere as long as it was with me, anywhere in the world
or out of it. You're a little startled because you have suddenly found
yourself in this corridor. You'll be somewhat more startled when I've taken
you into the room of the Matra, and you'll be terrified of Gohret, but you
will depend on me to take care of you. Come on, my very dear. We've got only
a little farther to go. And trust me."

"Yes, Johnny, dear. I trust you always and forever."

She has no suspicion that I am Astaris, I thought. She trusts me, and she
loves me. Queer. This feeling I have towards her, drawing me to her,
thrilling me at the very touch of her, is baffling. Something electrical in
its nature, something chemical. I can't quite analyze it, using March's
brain. If I could use my own—I'd better not, just yet. I don't have to.
Gohret will examine us, both of us, and he'll know exactly what change she
has made in me. Ah. We're here, outside the Room of the Matra. I hope that
her terror over what she'll see in it won't mask her love-reactions from
Gohret. Well, that's a chance I have to take. But I'll try to prepare her for
what awaits her.

"We're going through this door, dear," I said aloud. "There will be things
inside you won't understand, but trust me, no harm is going to come to
you."

"I'm not afraid, Johnny," she answered. "As long as I'm with you. But kiss
me, before you open that door."

I took her in my arms, the way I'd seen it done so many times, in so many
different centuries, and I pressed my lips against hers. Her slender body was
trembling in the circle of my arms, and her lips were cold on mine. Mine were
cold too, and there was a tightness around my brow. That was because this was
the crucial moment of my experiment, and I was really quite worried lest it
fail. Strange how this love business makes one susceptible to other emotions
too, how it weakens one's philosophical attitude toward all the phenomena of
nature.

I took her arms tenderly from about my neck. "We've got to go in,
darling," I said. I took her hand in mine. My fingers slid into my vest
pocket and, standing close to the wall, I pressed against it. We were going
through the wall. We were in the Room of the Matra. The guards circled the
crystal case, and Gohret stood above it, thinking how much depended on the
white, sleeping form within it.

The Plebos were startled. Their weapons came up. "Gohret!" I sent the
thought to my brother Doctil, proud a little of my triumph. "My experiment
has succeeded. I want you to examine the change in me, but be careful not to
disturb the female."

Aloud, I said, as Evelyn Rand might expect John March to say, "You sent
for us, Mister. What do you want?" And I kept moving toward the center of the
room.

We were moving straight on the lifted weapons of the Plebos. The fools.
They look uncertain. They are about to loose their rays. Is my pose as John
March too well done? Don't they, doesn't Gohret, believe that I am
Astaris?

John March's hand closed on the butt of the gun in the pocket of his
jacket, and his fingers curled over its trigger.

Evelyn Rand's feet dragged. There was no color in her face
and her eyes
were dark pits in its pallor. Gohret's thoughts were unformed, puzzled, as he
stood motionless above the bed of the Matra and watched us come toward
him.

They became clearer. "Something wrong, something blurred, in the way he
communicates with me I do not recognize Astaris' mind." "That is because my
mind uses the cells of March's brain," I answered him, silently. "I am
surprised that you do not comprehend it." I was beginning to be a little
angry at his stupidity, at the insolence of the Plebos who stood steadfast,
blocking me. Me, a Doctil! They were blocking my way no longer. Two had moved
aside to let us pass.

We were on the platform. We were within a long pace of the Matra's case.
John March's gun moved a bit to aim at the form within it-

Gohret's right tentacle lashed forward! March's finger squeezed the
trigger! The Doctil grabbed my arm in that exact moment. I saw the case
smash into splinters, I saw a red splotch on the Matra's temple. "Goodbye,
Eve!" I gasped, as the Plebos whirled to cut us down—Darkness smashed
into the room, utter, impenetrable darkness!

Gohret's reaching arm found me, and I pounded it with the butt of the gun,
out of my pocket now. "The power!" I sensed his startled thought. "All
power's off!" All about me was a jumble of panic, the Plebos' dismay, their
confusion. I knew they were trying to ray me down, but nothing was happening.
Nothing was happening because their weapons no longer tapped the energy that
would have sliced us to pieces as we'd seen the charging men sliced, out on
the floor of the Bowl.

Keeping tight hold of Evelyn I lurched toward where I recalled the wall
was, was using Orth's gun as a club to batter the unseen Plebos out of my
way. Confused, panicky, they were blundering into one another, into us.
Gohret's mind was searching for us, but we were screened from it by the
terror of the Plebos, by their silent shouts, "The Veil. The Veil of Ishlak
is gone. The drina are coming." Abruptly I was through their heaving mass,
was staggering across a free space, Eve still in the circle of my arm.

"It wasn't any use," I gasped. "We've killed the Matra, but Arthur had
smashed the machines." We thudded into something hard, vertical. "We've saved
our world, but we're through. The drina will get us."

"We've saved our world, Johnny," I heard her answer. "And we can die
happy. Like this." Her lips trailed across my cheek, found mine and clung to
them.

"No." I pulled my head back from hers. "Maybe the books are closing on us,
but we aren't dead yet." I was fishing in my vest- pocket. "We're not giving
up. If we're going to die, we'll die trying." I didn't have any hope the
'key' would get us through the wall now, with no energy-flux for it to tap,
but I was going to try it. "The drina haven't gotten us yet."

There were two small objects in my pocket. One of them was the key. The
other—I brought them both out—the other, I recalled, was the
black gem that I'd found in Evelyn Rand's room in Westchester and had carried
ever since.

"Put your arm around my waist, Eve," I directed. I held the gem in my left
hand while I put the key against the vertical rock and squeezed it.

Nothing happened. Well, I had expected that. We were done for. We'd stay
here 'til the drina found us—

We wouldn't be alive when the drina found us. Gohret was coming toward us!
In the same curious manner that I'd been able to hear their unspoken words, I
knew that he'd succeeded in quieting the Plebos, had located us, and was
coming to take revenge on us for the death of the Matra. He was no longer the
cold, intellectual man of the future. He was white hot with rage, with fury,
and he wasn't going to leave us for the drina. I turned to meet
him—

Started to turn! The floor heaved—threw me against the wall.
I shoved both hands against it, to save myself from falling. The black stone
in my left hand clicked on the rock, and there was a sharp, tearing sound.
Dim, brownish light jagged the blackness of the wall and there was dust in my
nostrils. The break in the facade widened, and I half fell through it.

Evelyn fell with me into the spiral corridor. Its floor heaved as I spun
to meet the menace of the Doctil—was just in time to see the cleft in
the wall through which we'd come closed by rock fragments tumbling into it,
to see them crush in Gohret's ungainly skull. Evelyn's little fists were
pounding my back. "The drina, Johnny," she screamed above a shrill vibration
of sound that 'til now I had been unaware of. "Look."

The brownish light came in through the aperture at the end of the long
ramp out of which Daster, long ago, had led me from the House of Sun. That
aperture was jagged-edged now, was growing wider as I glimpsed it. Was being
made wider by amorphous, purple-gray tendrils tearing at its rocky frame,
tearing the stone from it in great chunks. A purple-gray sea surged out there
beyond it, and it was from this sea that the shrill, ear-piercing whistle
rose.

"Good Lord!" I grunted. "The projectors on the tower were useless when the
power was cut off, and there was nothing at all to hold back the drina.
They've swallowed all the Future Men out there, and now they're tearing this
building apart to get at the few left inside here—and us. That's why
it's shaking so, as if it were in the grip of an earthquake. It's curtains
for us—"

"Not yet, Johnny. Their tearing at the building was what broke the cleft
in the wall, and saved us from Gohret. Don't you get some hope from
that?"

"I don't see—"

"Johnny!" Evelyn shook me. "You said we'd die trying."

"Yeah," I grunted. "But what's there left to try? Look. They're coming"
The aperture large enough, a purple-gray mass was oozing through it. "And
they're tearing the whole building down over our heads. Wait! They can't tear
the whole building down all at once, it's too huge. It will take them a long
time. There's one thing we can still try. If we can get to the top ahead of
them, if that stratcar can still fly—Come on!"

We were running up that steep, winding incline. We were running endlessly.
Behind us, and below, was the shrill and terrible whistle of the drina, and
the thud of falling stone, and abruptly there was a great scream in my mind,
a soundless scream that I knew to be the death cry of the Plebos whom we'd
left behind in the Room of the Matra.

And then the scream was ended, and there was only the shrill whistle of
the drina, and that was fading, and the shuddering of the floor under our
feet had diminished to an almost imperceptible vibration. We were running,
endlessly running in the sightless dark, endlessly circling, endlessly
climbing.

I started back, groping. "Eve!" I mustn't pass her in the dark. "Eve!" I
staggered from side to side of the passage to make sure I would not pass her.
"Eve, darling." My feet thudded against something soft, and I went to my
knees.

"Johnny." It was barely audible. "I can't... run any longer. Kiss me...
Johnny... and go."

I bent forward and kissed her. And then I was working my arms under her,
to lift her. I couldn't. I no longer had the strength. I couldn't lift Eve. I
couldn't carry her to safety.

Well, this was as good a place as any to die. I settled down, like that,
her warm body in my arms, the softness of her against my chest, my lips on
hers in a long, long kiss.

Very faintly I began to hear the drina's shrill whistle. They were coming.
They were coming up the black spiral. Very slowly they were coming, and they
had a long way to come, but they'd get here.

"We essay to sortie from this castle, the Archduke and I," he answered
"The others preferred to await their fate above."

"You can't get out, Arthur. You'll have to go back. Listen. Do you hear
that whistling sound?" It was only a little louder. "The drina are making
that. They're coming up the passage. You can't get past them."

"Back it is, then." He started off, carrying me. "Follow, Duke Orth."

"Let me down," I said feebly. "I can walk."

"Nay. Layest thou quietly in our arms, John. Thou art but hardly able to
make thyself heard. Thou hast not strength to make this exceeding great climb
but we have the strength for both. Lie still, and let thy king carry
thee."

There wasn't any use in arguing with him. "What happened, Arthur? Why did
you smash the machinery? Didn't you see in the disk that we'd gotten into the
room of the Matra? Why didn't you give us a few seconds more?"

"Nay an that we would have, had we been able. The Frenchman had slain the
single guard, and we were gathered in the chamber where the magical
contrivances buzzed like an hundred hives of bees, all but the lad Louis who
guarded without as thou hadst commanded him. We watched thee in that Satan's
circle, marvelling that the demons permitted thee to pass through their
ranks, that the orange-clad ogre seemed to greet thee amicably but in that
instant the lad cried out, 'Plebos! Ware Plebos!' and instanter I with
Excalibur, the duke and the Jew and the Frenchman with their bare
hands, shattered the witch lights that shone there.

"In the sudden night we leaped upon the demons already within the chamber.
Then, indeed, Excalibur proved its worth. The unequal combat was over and
done with in a trice. No quarter was asked in that fray, and none given."

"How about Astaris?"

"He remaineth our prisoner."

I would have asked more, but just then the passage curved and levelled
out, and ahead a wavering yellow light silhouetted Elijah's tall, bearded
form and cast a wavering glimmer on the faces of Villon and the Dauphin, who
seemed absorbed in something the poet was telling him. The light came from a
small, extremely smoky fire on the floor. "We each gave some article of our
apparel," Arthur explained it. "And Duke Orth set flame to them with fire
dust he beareth with him."

"Powder for that gun of mine," the Austrian made clear.

"Let me down," I told Arthur. "I'm all right now." This time he took my
word for it and so I was on my own feet when Villon spied me.

"John!" He bounded toward me, and before I could prevent him, had kissed
me on the cheeks. "John! Mourning you for dead, I was about to compose an
elegy for you. And Evelyn," he turned to her. "The white flower of all man's
dreams! Now indeed, Elijah my bearded rabbi, I begin to have some credence in
the efficacy of your heathen prayers."

"We still need those prayers, Elijah. Listen." I lifted my hand. The
whistle of the drina came clearly from the passage that had led us here.
"We've got just about five minutes to find some way out of here, and I don't
know what that could be, unless the stratcar's still working. Is there any
way we can get into the hangar?"

"We've searched. Its walls are solid—But you have the 'key',
John!"

"I have it." Somehow I'd held on to it all this time. "But it isn't any
good." I held it out to him. "Want it for a souvenir—" It was my left
hand I had held out. The black thing on its palm was not the 'key,' but the
carved gem.

"How came you by this?" It was Elijah who demanded that, staring down at
the thing. There was something of surprise, something almost of awe, in his
face. "How came you by it?"

"Why?" I asked. "What is it?"

"The very basis of the Kabbala," the prophet answered me. "The very
essence of all its philosophy. Look you." He pointed at it. "The Snake of
Life, swallowing its own tail, and therefore without beginning and without
end. His coils wind in and out in symbol that the spirit of the Godhead, no
matter how twisted, no matter through how many planes of existence, how many
layers of time and space it passes, returns always upon itself, and is always
of one nature, one being. Israel possessed this before my time, and before my
time it was lost! How come you by it, John March?"

"I found it in Eve's room."

Elijah turned to her, but it was to me she said, "You gave it to me,
Johnny."

"What!"

She smiled wanly. "I mean the play-friend I called Johnny gave it to me.
At least, I found it on my dresser one day, after he'd gone. I don't know
where it could have come from."

"It was I who left it there." No voice this but a brain-echo I knew must
come from a Doctil. From Astaris, the only Doctil still alive. "I found it on
this planet, Evelyn Rand, and I left it with you when you were a child so
that I should know you again when you had grown old enough to be brought
here." He stood beside me, his broken bonds at his feet. "When I had brought
you here I replaced it where I had first left it to mark for me the man you
were destined to love."

The nape of my neck prickled. Astaris had brought the gem to Earth from
this planet, yet Elijah had recognized it as a sacred symbol of the creed
that was among the very first on Earth to proclaim the Oneness of God. It was
made of the selfsame substance as the awesome monument of the Being the drina
worshipped, yet a million years before there had been any contact between
Earthman and drina, it, or something so like it that the Prophet in Israel
had been able at once and fluently to interpret its intricate message, had
existed on Earth. There was meaning beneath meaning in the carved gem. Was
it, I asked myself, by accident that the wall of the Matra's room had split
for Evelyn and me precisely where I had struck it with the gem-? "The drina!"
The Dauphin's cry broke in upon these thoughts. "Messieurs,the drina
are upon us," and the shrill whistle of the drina pierced my ears and their
slither was very loud against the spiral tunnel's walls.

I twisted to where it debauched into the room, saw the first gray- purple
psuedopod squirm in, saw Arthur leap to it, saw Excaliburflash above
his blonde locks and slash down.

The jelled and terrible mass quivered in the doorway, hesitant. "Take the
maid, my old," Villon whispered to me, his smile still holding the twisted
and bitter mockery with which it greeted life and death alike. "Retreat with
her behind the great engine and do there what you must. We will defend you as
long as we may." Then he was beside the king, his poniard hacking at a
renewed surge of the drina as Orth thrust a twist of powder, a bullet into my
hand, whirled and with a bar snatched from somewhere had joined the
others.

As I feverishly reloaded Orth's pistol, I saw Elijah flailing the dark
protoplasmic surge with a black length of wrist-thick cable. The gun was
ready and I looked for Evelyn, found her wrestling with the Dauphin who
struggled to break her hold and join the hopeless battle against the
drina. I saw her eyes widen with horror abruptly, saw the boy break
loose and dive headlong to where a slow wave rolled over the Archduke and
engulfed him.

Arthur already was gone, but the white-maned patriarch and the poet still
fought, giving back step by reluctant step from the horror—it was
utterly useless to fight but that somehow they slowed in its inexorable
advance. "Evelyn," I called. "Eve," and as she came about to me strong in my
nostrils was the perfume that had been all I'd known of her for so long, the
fragrance of a terrestrial spring that neither of us would ever know again.
"Eve, darling," I said. "There is only one more thing I can do for you."
Raising the pistol, taking careful aim, I said. "You understand, I know."

I read comprehension in her gray eyes and thanks and love. I heard Elijah
drone the prayer a devout Hebrew prays when he is about to die, and I heard
the prayer silenced. I heard Villon cry, "Farewell, John and Evelyn. Fare you
very—" and that cry was blotted out. I gritted my teeth for the pull on
the trigger that would give Evelyn a clean death—

I'd forgotten him, but now in that blazing instant our minds were one and
I knew that he had the power to save himself or us but not himself and
us.

"I am sending you back, John Marsh. You—and Evelyn Rand."

His experiment had been successful. He had set out to learn love and he
had. He'd learned love and in learning love he'd learned sacrifice.

A scream of ultimate anguish threaded blue-edged through my brain—
but it was not from Evelyn it came, nor from me. We were wrapped in sudden
darkness. Not darkness. An absence of color, of form, of reality itself. We
were falling through nothingness. We were caught up in some unimaginable
maelstrom, we were whirling down and down in a spaceless, timeless
nonexistence.

A whorl of dust swirled away from us down the country road
and faded into
the gray and quiet light of dusk.

Cicadas began their shrill piping in the thickets. The evening star
twinkled in the sky's darkening blue and I turned to Evelyn. "We're home,
Eve," I murmured. "We're home again, dear heart. In our own time. In our own
world."

"Home, Johnny." She opened the gate and a faded, tenuous voice came to us
out of the dusk. "Come, Evelyn. Come in and bring your young man with you.
Come in to Faith who's been waiting a long time for you."

The voice came from the porch of a great house that glimmered whitely in
the dusk. Faith Corbett, so shrunken and fragile that it seemed a not too
high wind must blow her away was calling from the open door that framed a
rectangle of light, warm and welcoming. Hand in hand Evelyn and I went up the
path to the house where a lonely child with curls the hue of honey used to
play with the Johnny of her dreams.

It seemed natural that supper waited piping hot for us on the table in a
high-ceiled dining room walled with dark and lustrous oak. It seemed so
natural that it was not 'til we sat side by side on the cushioned sofa before
the great fireplace in the parlor that Evelyn thought to ask Faith Corbett
how she'd known to have the house ready for us, how she'd known we were
coming home.

"I knew," she smiled faintly. "When John talked with me in my cottage I
knew then that he would find you and that he would bring you home in two
days."

"Two days, Faith!" I exclaimed. In that Otherwhere it had seemed but a few
hours. "Are you sure it is two days since I talked with you?"

"Aye, I am sure," her thin voice answered. "That was Sunday afternoon and
this is Tuesday night." And then she was rustling out of that drowsy room, so
bent and shrunken and old that she seemed a wraith from some, Otherwhere
herself, and left us to the red leap of the fire and to the peace of our
being together with no fear brooding in our hearts and no doom overhanging us
and our world.

Eve stirred in my arms, after a while. "Johnny," she murmured. "It
—it was all a dream, wasn't it. I dreamed it."

"No, dear heart. You didn't dream it. It was very real. It—" my brow
puckered. "I—I'm not so sure. It's getting so vague now. It does seem
as though I dreamed it. But we couldn't both have had the same dream. That
isn't possible."

"How do we know it was the same dream, Johnny?" Eve asked. The scent of
her was in my nostrils, the redolence of spring and the evasive fragrance of
dreams. "Suppose we tell each other what we remember, and then we'll know
whether it was the same—the same nightmare we both had."

"No, darling. We won't talk about it any more. Not tonight. But I'll write
it all out, and you'll read what I've written and tell me whether it checks
with your memories."

And so, when at last we went up to the rooms Faith Corbett had prepared
for us, airing them, warming the sheets, I did not go to sleep but sat down
at an old desk to write what I could remember. This that you have read is
what I wrote that night, and all the next day, and all the next night, and
when I read it over after I'd finished, it was all quite as new to me as it
was to you.

And Evelyn had no memory at all of any of her part in the narrative.

Now this might seem to prove that it was only a particularly vivid
nightmare that I had had, except for this. Evelyn cannot tell me where she
was between Sunday, January 26th and Tuesday, February 11th of this year nor
has the most diligent search unearthed for us anyone who saw her between when
the doorman of her apartment house watched her set out for church and when
Faith called to us from the doorway of her old home in Westchester. And none
of my friends, my acquaintances can be found who saw hide or hair of me on
Monday the 10th or Tuesday, the 11th.

I have been able to locate the entrance guard of a certain art gallery on
Madison Avenue, the owner of a second hand bookstore on the same
thoroughfare, a policeman who was on post near that bookstore Monday before
noon and a taxi driver. All four of these men recall me and the latter three
recall exactly the details I have set down in this narrative.

Understandably, I think, I did not care to interview the owner of the
drugstore on Plum Street.

In addition, I have looked up whatever is known about the other five of us
who were taken out of time—if my story is true. There is no question as
to the inexplicable disappearances of Francois Villon and John Orth. The
incident of Elijah and the pillar of fire is in the Old Testament, of
Arthur's passing in the Morte d'Arthur and in Tennyson's immortal
poem. The evidence as to the Dauphin is confusing. He did vanish from the
Paris prison where he had been jailed from the age of nine, but some legends
still extant insist that he escaped and lived to a secluded old age on Long
Island. But then it will be recalled that I did not actually see Louis die.
It is possible that Astaris sent him back to his own time as he did Evelyn
and me to ours.

All these circumstances seem to confirm what I have written. There is
another concerning which I cannot make up my mind as to whether it verifies
or casts doubt on my tale.

One day, not very long ago, Evelyn and I decided to make a pilgrimage to
Furman Street, and examine the curious old house at four-nineteen. We took a
taxi, and I dismissed it exactly where that other had had its flat.

Now that, to my certain knowledge, was the only previous time I'd ever
been in this section of Brooklyn, yet I threaded the maze of those quiet
streets with the curious Games of Orange, Pineapple, Cranberry, in absolute
certitude, and found Plum without any trouble.

We walked past the drugstore where I seem to have had a weird experience
with a card that no one could see but I and started climbing the slope at
whose end was the brightness of a blue sky over the water of the bay.

The glorious massing of towers at the end of Manhattan Island rose slowly
above the summit of that ascent. "The house is right at the end of this
vista," I told Eve. "We'll see it in a moment."

We came to the end of the sidewalk, at Furman Street. Along that
waterfront thoroughfare ran the rows of four-storied graystone houses I
recalled, exactly as I recalled them. The one to our left had the number,
415, painted on the third step of its high stoop. The one to our right was
number 423.

Between them was an iron fence edging a green lawn. The emerald velvet ran
to the edge of the retaining wall that keeps Furman Street from tumbling into
the East River, and there was no house upon it. None at all.

There was no Four Nineteen Furman Street. There never had been.

I hope this means that the adventure I have related was some strange
illusion, that Eve's disappearance for two weeks, mine for two days, has some
other explanation. For otherwise there is this disquieting thought to haunt
me.

The Kintat of Doctils who will conquer the planet of the drina a million
years from now, will believe themselves, their Plebos and their Matra, to be
the sole remnant of Mankind. But suppose they are not. Suppose that from
among the people of some other Earth City other Doctils, another Matra, will
survive the catastrophe. Suppose that these will plan just such a return to
the Earth of what to them is the dim past—as Astaris and his fellows
will. Suppose that right now they are somewhere among us, spying on us.

Suppose that man in the subway this morning, that man with the
strangely yellow skin and the weird, veiled eyes—

"But, Johnny," Evelyn interrupts. She has been reading over my shoulder, a
cute trick now, but I'm afraid I shall have to ask her to stop that sort of
thing when our honeymoon is over. "If it all really happened, we know the
course of history for a million years and we know that no race of Future Men
will come back to conquer us in this century or any other."

"We know nothing of the sort," I answer her. "We know nothing about the
nature of Time as yet. It might well be that Time is like a great river with
many forks down any or all of which the great tide of history may flow. Are
we certain that Mankind has only one destiny, the one we saw in the Hall of
Midnights Can we be wholly sure that the end of Man inevitably must be that
which we saw?"

She has a way, I have learned, of withdrawing into herself when she is
thinking, of seeming to be far and far away. She does that now, and now she
is back to me, her gray eyes wide. "Johnny. If that's so, Johnny—"

She checks herself. "If it's so," I ask, "what then?"

With her whimsical irrelevance that is not irrelevance at all, she
responds, "Remember, Johnny, why the Doctils picked our century for the
return to earth? Remember that this was the critical time when what you just
called the great tide of history was at a fork in the river of Man's
destiny?"

"Yes," I say softly, suspecting what is in her mind but wanting her to put
it into words. "Yes, I remember. Go on."

"I can't," Evelyn murmurs, her gray eyes deep and dark with her thoughts.
"I can't go on by myself and you and I can't, Johnny, not just the two of us.
But maybe all the people of all the world, together, can."

"Can what, Eve?"

"Direct our destiny down the other branch of the fork in Time's river, the
branch that will bring our children's children to some brighter and happier
future than the dreadful one we saw in that Hall of Midnight."

Her breath catches in her throat and her lip quivers, and she is a child
again, a frightened child in the dark. "Can't we, Johnny? Please, Johnny,
please say that we can. Please say that we will."

I want to. Very terribly I want to reassure her but I cannot. I alone,
John March alone cannot tell her which way Man will direct his destiny. It
does not rest with me alone to decide.

It is for all of us to make that decision, no matter in what part of
the world we dwell, no matter with what tongue we speak, no matter in what
manner we worship Him Who looks down upon Earth and upon some planet beyond
the furthest galaxy. We still have, or still can recover, Obligation and
Loyalty and Faith, and, yes, and Beauty and Love and with these still can
direct our destiny to some better goal than the Doctils showed me and Evelyn
in that Otherwhere. We still can decide.

But we must make the decision soon. As Pierpont Alton Sturdevant might
say, in his lawyer's phrase, Time is of the essence.